History of Arizona
While Arizona’s history as documented by Europeans begins when Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan, explored the area in 1539, the first Native Americans arrived in the present-day territory of the state of Arizona between 16,000 and 10,000 BC. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition explored the area between 1540 and 1542 during his search for the mythical city of Cíbola. Father Eusebio Francisco Kino organized a series of missions and taught Christianity to the indigenous people of Pimería Alta (present-day southern Arizona and northern Sonora) between the 1690s and early 1700s. Spain established fortified settlements (presidios) at Tubac in 1752 and at Tucson in 1775.
All of present-day Arizona became part of the Mexican state of Old California after independence from Spain was achieved in 1821. The United States took possession of most of Arizona at the end of the American intervention in Mexico in 1848. In 1853, lands south of the Gila River were purchased from Mexico by the United States at the Mesilla Sale. Arizona was administered as part of the New Mexico Territory until it was organized as a separate territory on February 24, 1863.
Arizona was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1912, officially becoming a state of the United States of America.
Phoenix was the site of a German and Italian prisoner of war camp during World War II. The site was purchased after the war by the Maytag family and is now the Phoenix Zoo. Two of the three largest Japanese-American internment camps were also located within the state: Poston and Gila River.
PREHISTORY
According to the main archaeological and geological evidence, mammoth-hunting families moved into the North American northwest in the Paleolithic sometime between 16,000 BC and 10,000 BC. C. In central Alaska, they found their way blocked by a massive ice sheet until a temporary recession in the last Ice Age opened an ice-free passage through northwestern Canada, allowing the groups to disperse across the rest of the continent. The oldest conclusive evidence of human habitation in the southwestern United States is a set of Paleolithic spear points. Some scientists have proposed that small groups of women, men, and children roamed the deserts of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico 10,000 to 20,000 years before the mammoth hunters.
According to geoscientist Paul Martin, these groups, armed with Clovis points (named after the site near Clovis, New Mexico, where the first point was found), encountered mammoths, camels, ground sloths, and horses. Since these species had never before encountered such powerful hunters, the result was the «Pleistocene massacre» — the rapid, systematic killing of nearly all large mammal species in North America by about 8000 B.C.E. In some ways, the hunters who pursued the mammoths may have represented the first of Arizona’s many boom-bust cycles, in which a single resource is relentlessly exploited until it is exhausted or destroyed.
Archaeologists call the 7,000 years between the disappearance of big game hunters and the rise of pottery-making societies in the second century A.D. the Archaic period. Most Archaic groups survived by becoming generalists rather than specialists, foraging for food in seasonal movements across mountains, deserts, and plateaus. They did not abandon hunting, but they relied more heavily on wild plants and hunting small animals. Their tools became more varied, with grinding and cutting implements becoming increasingly common—a sign that seeds, fruits, and vegetables made up a significant part of their diet.
Climate changes facilitated the transition away from big game hunting. When the first big game hunters arrived in Arizona, forests extended to areas nearly 3,000 feet lower than today. In the Sonoran Desert, forests of pinyon, juniper, and oak extended downhill to about 1,800 feet (550 m)—the elevation of the lower slopes of Camelback Mountain in Phoenix. Desert grasslands met valleys covered with Joshua trees and yuccas. The great ponderosa pine forests of the Colorado Plateau were gone. The giant saguaro—the plant that, for many people, symbolizes Arizona—has largely taken refuge in modern-day Mexico.
Temperatures rose, and the seasonal distribution of precipitation began to change, causing major changes in vegetation as well. Clovis people hunted mammoths and other Ice Age species in southeastern Arizona at a time when many streams were drying up, forcing animals to concentrate around rivers and reservoirs. The increasing aridity of the region therefore coincided with the arrival of hunters who specialized in pursuing large mammals. Climate and humans may have acted together to wipe out these species.
Arizona became even more arid after the last Ice Age ended. Summers were wetter, but also warmer, so precipitation evaporated more quickly. Winters became considerably drier, with less moisture available for plants. In southern Arizona, forests gave way to desert grasslands, and desert grasslands gave way to desert scrub. Important Sonoran Desert species such as saguaro and farinosa (Encelia farinosa) began to recolonize the region from the south, while ponderosa pine and pinyon-juniper-oak forests retreated toward the Colorado Plateau. By 2000 B.C.E., By 1000 BCE, modern plant communities in Arizona had become established and the current climate prevailed.
Early Archaic people in Arizona survived these changes by adapting to plant cycles rather than trying to change them. In the forests, they gathered acorns in July and August, and pine nuts and juniper berries in November. In the desert, they gathered the leaves of plants such as quinoa and amaranth. They also roasted agave each spring, gathered cactus fruits, and harvested mesquite pods in the summer. Because of their dependence on seasonal resources, Archaic groups did not permanently settle in any one place, but instead wandered from field to field in search of water and food.
Their tools reflected their economy: grinding tools (manos and metates) were used to pulverize seeds into flour, scrapers for working hide and wood, and projectile points, smaller and more primitive than Clovis and Folsom points, for hunting large and small animals. The varying proportions of such tools at different sites suggest that people moved among different environmental zones to exploit the particular resources of each.
The Introduction of Agriculture
For most of the Archaic period, people were unable to transform their environment in any fundamental way. Many archaeologists assumed that Arizona’s Archaic cultures were like dead ends. They believed that groups outside the region, particularly from Mesoamerica, introduced momentous innovations such as agriculture to the Southwest. According to this theory, maize first took root in the southwest in the highlands of New Mexico and eastern Arizona, the pre-Hispanic cultural area known as the Mogollon. Archaic populations there began cultivating a small, primitive variety of maize at places like Bat Cave as early as 3500 BCE. From there, maize slowly spread to lower, more arid areas such as the Sonoran Desert.
During the 1980s, these early dates for maize were challenged by improvements in radiocarbon dating using the mass spectrometer technique. The new dates revealed that the first maize at Bat Cave and other highland sites appeared around 1000 BCE, 2,500 years later than had been initially estimated. Several excavation sites in southern Arizona have shown that Archaic farmers were already cultivating maize in the Tucson Basin at about the same time. At the Milagro site along Tanque Verde Creek, for example, a Late Archaic population was building underground houses, dug bell-shaped storage pits, and cultivating maize by about 850 BCE. Archaic peoples, therefore, were already beginning to make the transition from foragers to food producers by about 3,000 years ago. They also had many of the cultural features that go with semisedentary agricultural life: storage facilities, more stable dwellings, larger settlements, and even cemeteries.
Despite the early advent of agriculture, Late Archaic peoples still exercised little control over their environment. Thus, natural food resources continued to be important components of their diet, even after the invention of pottery and the development of irrigation. The introduction of agriculture never resulted in the complete abandonment of hunting and food gathering, even in the largest Archaic societies. During the first millennium AD, at least three major cultures flourished in the Southwest: the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon. These three cultures are well known for their architecture and pottery.
The Great Depression and the World Wars
In 1917, the United States entered World War I, thus beginning a boom in Arizona’s economy. After suffering through the Great Depression, the implementation of the New Deal and another economic boom after World War II brought Arizona back to a state of stability.
During this time period, industries such as cotton, copper, and agriculture began to flourish in the state. The military began using Phoenix and Tucson as military bases and academies, with the military becoming the largest source of income for the community.
During the war, people also began moving to Arizona from other regions of the country due to its inland position and protection from air raids. In 1946, Arizona began enforcing right-to-work laws, which allowed workers to decide whether or not they wanted to financially support a union. The double-wage system was abandoned. In 1948, high-tech industry began in Arizona with Motorola building one of its first plants in Phoenix. Also in 1948, Native Americans gained the right to vote, after being disqualified for twenty years as “wards of the state.”