Along one side of the site runs a small trickle of water, slick with languid green strands of algae. Today, all that remain of the Hohokam big house are a smattering of mounds, earthen walls, and the outlines of small rooms that served as living quarters, granaries, and perhaps ceremonial centers. Nineteenth- and early-20th-century white settlers marveled at the perfect design of the canals, which, in the words of one observer, were “an engineering triumph.” No other ancient civilization in the Americas-not even the Inca or the Maya-built a more extensive water conveyance system. The canals diverted water from the Salt River to irrigate the Hohokam’s fields of maize, melons, squash, and beans. The key to the Hohokam’s success in the blistering climate of the Sonoran Desert was a complex network of canals that, at its zenith, was some 500 miles in length, crisscrossing what is now affectionately referred to as the Valley of the Sun. While the Roman Empire was falling into decay, the Hohokam culture was building one of the greatest cities in what would eventually be called the Americas. Home to hundreds of families at any one time, Pueblo Grande was but a single outpost in a sprawling, thriving civilization of as many as 300,000 people at its height. Pueblo Grande, the “big house,” was settled around AD 450 and for close to 1,000 years was continuously inhabited by the Hohokam people. Both retired (she from her interior design business) in 2016.Not far from the constant roar of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport and just a few miles from the massive, air-conditioned stadium of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team lies what might be the quietest enclave in the United States’ fastest-growing city. They were married within months, but he says he thought of Vietnam thousands of times in the years that followed as the couple raised their family in Ohio and joined the Harbour Ridge community in Palm City in 1990. After recovering in a Japanese hospital he returned home to Minster, Ohio, and into the arms of his childhood sweetheart, Jill. The honeymoon phase of his deployment with the 39th Combat Engineer Battalion American Division (where his unit constructed a bridge and guarded a landing zone) was brief as he was wounded by shrapnel just four months later. That first impression might be what changed his life - and the lives of many others - for the better. Yet after being drafted to serve in the Army during the undeclared war there, he remembers being pleasantly surprised for the first day or two by the country’s lush greenery and friendly people. But Fred Grimm, who was just a year out of high school in April 1969, did not choose to visit the distant and exotic country of Vietnam. Travel changes people by opening their eyes to new cultures and ways of life. Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute Foundation South Florida Orthopaedics & Sports MedicineĬhildren’s Services Council of St. Lucie Countyįlorida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute about/st-lucie-county-historyĮconomic Development Council of St. Okeechobee County Tourist Development Council Please support the advertising partners who helped bring you this edition of Indian River Magazine.

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