Hohokams built eight hundred miles of irrigation canals by 1450

Evidence

The Hohokam people left behind ball courts similar to those of the Mayans, multistory buildings, and agricultural fields. Their most striking imprint on the land is one of the most extensive networks of irrigation canals in the world at that time. From AD 900 to 1450, the Hohokams built a canal system of more than eight hundred miles of trunk lines and hundreds more miles of branches serving local sites. The longest known canal extended twenty miles. The largest were seventy-five to eighty-five feet across and twenty feet deep, and many were leak-proof, lined with clay. One canal system carried enough water to irrigate an estimated ten thousand acres. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 56

Categorization

• XREF: Directly addresses the reader’s goal of learning the Indigenous story on the land of the Southwest — engineering scale that rivals Old World feats.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 56