Arizona’s new heat officer said Friday that he is working with local governments and nonprofit groups to open more cooling centers and ensure homes have working air conditioners in a more unified effort to prevent another ghastly toll of heat-related deaths this summer.
There is a reason it is named Phoenix. That valley has been settled and abandoned several times throughout history.
The only reason it has survived this time is through the power of air conditioning.
Horse shit.
It was never abandoned. The valley was steadily habitated for thousands of years by a number of tribes before American settlers forces the Yaqui from the land.
None of them had air conditioning, and they thrived until a foreign invader took their land by force.
They were also nomadic, and left when it got too dry/hot. Which goes to show they were a lot smarter than most people living there now.
I don’t know the history here, but wouldn’t a nomadic people that leave when the heat / drought gets bad, still count as “abandoning”, in a sense? Or were they more or less a permanent settlement?
To me, “abandonment” means they have no plans to return. It sounds like what they did was more similar to what retirees do with winter homes in Florida/Arizona and summer homes in the midwest/northeast.
Sure, but the context was that one person asserted that Pheonix was a terrible place to place to have a permanent settlement because of heat and drought, and someone else refuted with an “Ackchyually” style response.
If the native people relocated regularly to avoid heat and drought, then that strengthens the first assertion that it’s a bad place to support a permanent population.
But again, I don’t know the actual habits of these specific natives. Maybe they weren’t nomadic and found ways to survive where Pheonix now stands. I asked because I’m curious to the history.
They survived by digging a canal system to bring water from rivers far away. Those same canals are what feeds Phoenix it’s water a milenia later. We just added cement to them.
Huh. That’s pretty awesome. I had no idea that there were native American tribes contructing long aqueducts.
https://www.arizonamuseumofnaturalhistory.org/plan-a-visit/mesa-grande/the-hohokam
Seems like archeologists think that they were most likely wiped out by a population boom followed by a bad drought, though. Still, I had no idea that level of agriculture existed at the time. Pretty interesting.
That level of agriculture is nothing compared to what civilizations like the Aztecs, who figured out how to grow crops in the middle of a lake, and the Inca, who figured out how to freeze-dry crops they grew on landscaped, terraced mountainsides.
The Maya were also really excellent at hydraulic engineering out of necessity because there were no lakes or rivers in much of their domain.
And then there’s the plant we call corn or maize today. This is what it started as (teosinte) before people in Mexico started selectively breeding it over thousands of years:
People really need to understand that ‘stone age’ (or bronze age in the case of the Inca) does not actually mean they were unable to understand how to do really complicated things. People look at an expertly-knapped mesolithic hand axe and think they could do it themselves in 20 minutes with any rock they picked up.
I think they were talking about the Anasazi, but that was a different part of Arizona.