Ariz. canals whet appetite for ancient history

Dennis Wagner, USA TODAY | USA TODAY

PHOENIX -- Two things you might not expect to find if you visit the foothills of Mount Graham in eastern Arizona:

1) An elaborate network of "hanging canals" likely built nearly a thousand years ago on steep mesas by long-forgotten ancients.

2) An endearingly eccentric electrical engineer and author who, long before he started trying to solve the archaeological mystery, helped pioneer the world of personal computers.

Nevertheless, on a sunny morning, Don Lancaster wrestles his four-wheel-drive SUV over ruts and boulders into the bajada above the Gila River Valley.

His voice rising with excitement, the bearded 73-year-old urges passengers to hold tight and keep their eyes on the slope of a nearby butte.

"Right around this corner," he promises. "You won't miss it. One of the most spectacular of the hanging canals.... As far as I know, what we have here is unique in the Southwest -- and could be in the world."

Sure enough, about 180 feet up the steep slope, a curious line is visible, angling slightly downward toward the Safford Basin. On closer inspection, it appears to be a ditch about 1 yard wide carved into the hillside. The structure is clearly man-made, with an outer edge buttressed by layers of stone to prevent erosion.

There's no obvious reason for the feature's existence, no sign of machine work. Abandoned and eroded centuries ago, it no longer carries water. But Lancaster says the linear landscape is part of a sophisticated irrigation system that provided water to prehistoric American fields and villages.

He calls this segment the Marijilda Canal complex, originating at a stream by that name before meandering 19 miles through hilly terrain. It's just one among 21 distinct networks involving at least 40 miles of canals.

The design reflects not just brute labor but uncanny engineering from a prehistoric culture.

"The societal organization on this had to be just off the wall," Lancaster says.

He isn't alone in that interpretation: James A. Neely, a professor emeritus of anthropology from the University of Texas-Austin, has written detailed papers describing "some of the most complex and innovative agricultural and water-management technology found" in the Southwest.

The curious collaboration between these men began about four years ago, but Lancaster's scientific interests go back decades.

Nerd makes good

Lancaster is a bearded septuagenarian reminiscent of Doc Brown in "Back to the Future" films, with a colorful shirt/personality and a sense of humor as dry as the high desert.

His online autobiography tells of growing up in Pennsylvania, a high-school nerd who fussed with ham radios, did not win the state science fair and "seemed to spend most of my time getting thrown into trash bins or belittled by gym teachers."

After earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, he completed graduate studies at Arizona State University while working for Goodyear Aerospace Corp. His 1966 thesis was on integrated circuitry that he designed "by biasing RTL logic gates into their linear amplification region, thus making great diff amps."

"I was the original computer geek," Lancaster acknowledges, grinning.

During free time, he also worked on a master's degree in anthropology at ASU, but dropped out of the program after becoming disillusioned with faculty politics and the empirical uncertainty of a "soft science."

One of Lancaster's early electronic inventions employed semiconductor chips and linked an alphanumeric keyboard to a television so that words could be typed on the screen. The "TV Typewriter," as he named it, appeared in a 1973 edition of Popular Electronics magazine.

"It instantly became the most popular hobby construction project of all time," he notes, "and was felt by some to be the opening shot fired in the personal-computer revolution."

High-tech historians have since labeled a number of people, Lancaster among them, as "father of the personal computer."

Lancaster and his wife, Bee, who also studied anthropology and once ran a Native American museum, settled in Thatcher more than three decades ago. He wanted a quiet place to write and invent but wound up teaching electronics at Eastern Arizona College, joining the volunteer fire department (he still goes out on calls) and running a side business as electronic-parts monger.

Lancaster has managed to go trekking through the local outback almost weekly, searching for caves, local lore and pockets of rainwater known as tinajas. His online guide to trails in Graham County is exhaustive.

During long walks, Lancaster became puzzled by contours of stone and soil snaking out of high canyons. They made no sense as trails. What could they be?

Meeting of 2 minds

While surfing the Internet a few years ago, Lancaster came across a scientific report by Neely. He called the professor, and the two scientists began sharing information.

Neely, who earned his doctoral degree at the University of Arizona, is an expert on ancient irrigation systems of the Southwest, Mexico and Iran.

While mentoring a graduate student in eastern Arizona years ago, Neely noticed a foothill conduit -- "a very unusual phenomenon." He suspected there may be more, but didn't get a chance to do research.

After meeting Lancaster at a local lecture, Neely pointed out a segment of the Marijilda Canal. The rest is (ancient) history: Lancaster, with typical intensity, launched a study of what he calls "hanging canals," discovering the full network.

Both are careful to stress that theories on the purpose and history of these man-made waterways are speculative, though supported by science.

"We have 12 separate, independent arguments that these are prehistoric, any one of which is weak," Lancaster says. "But if you take them all together, the probability of them being wrong is minuscule."

Neely says it is unclear who built the hanging canals. He estimates that the system dates to about A.D. 1200 to 1400, an era when the Gila River Valley emerged as a sort of migration hub for Mimbres, Hohokam, Salado and Ancient Pueblo peoples. Archaeological evidence suggests there may have been as many folks living in the Safford area then as today.

Neely is unaware of any similar canal design in the world, but he stresses that agricultural systems have not been intensely studied, so it's possible that they exist elsewhere -- even in other parts of Arizona.

The hanging canals begin near where mountain streams typically submerge into high-desert soil, at elevations as high as 4,300 feet. No ancient surveying equipment has been found, and it remains unclear how the engineering was accomplished.

The canals were cut at an average grade of less than 2 percent, so slight that in places there is an illusion of reverse flow.

"It's absolutely amazing," Lancaster says. "You can stand and stare at these and you'll swear that up is down and down is up."

Because of the design, large-scale earth-moving was seldom necessary, though backbreaking labor was required to build meandering curves that follow terrain.

Where canals drop off from mesa ridges, the researchers found stone splash sites to reduce erosion, a design known as French drains. One segment of Marijilda Canal features an elevated aqueduct -- about 270 feet long and the height of a man.

Neely says he believes all of the work was done with stone hoes and mattocks, crude tools similar to the pickax, several of which he discovered in the area.

"It was a tremendous amount of labor that went into digging these things," he says. "It either employed a very long time period with a few people, or a relatively short period with a lot of people."

At places, the canals lead directly through ancient home sites -- still visible as ruins strewn with pottery shards -- an indication that they provided domestic water. There is evidence of terraced gardens where herbs may have been grown outside huts. Eventually, however, the flow led to flatland crops of corn, squash, beans and cotton.

Neely and Lancaster marvel at the design and sometimes imagine what it would have been like nearly a thousand years ago in a land without faucets -- or computers.

Neely says the hanging canals carry a lesson of history: "They tell us our ancient ancestors were much more sophisticated and intelligent than we've given them credit for. And, to some extent, it may help us find ways out of the binds we've gotten ourselves into."

Dennis Wagner also reports for The Arizona Republic.