Every time you drive over a canal in the Valley, there’s a good chance you’re crossing a route first carved out more than 1,000 years ago. Beginning around A.D. 200, ancestral Sonoran Desert communities built an enormous canal network off the Salt River, using hand tools to irrigate thousands of acres across what is now metro Phoenix. At its peak, the system supported tens of thousands of people in the desert. Around A.D. 1450, much of the canal system was abandoned. Centuries later, Jack Swilling and other settlers recognized the old channels, cleared portions of them and began running water through them again. That connection between an ancient community and a new one helped inspire the name Phoenix, a city rising from what came before it. Today, archaeological research suggests many of the Valley’s modern canal routes still follow those ancient paths. And the people who built them did not simply disappear. Their descendants remain here today, including communities within the Gi...