Hohokam Agave

Description

Agave murpheyi is a species of agave. It is a succulent plant that is found growing only at a few dozen archaeological sites of the ancient Hohokam Indians in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. In 1935 there were reported half a dozen sites and in 1970 only two were known. It appears to be a cultivar grown by the Hohokam for food and fiber. Its common names include Hohokam agave, Murphey agave, and Murphey's century plant. This agave produces a rosette of leaves up to 80 centimeters long by 20 centimeters wide in shades of green to blue-green with pale banding. They develop a red coloration during flowering. The leaves may curl slightly toward the center. They are lined with small, straight teeth and tipped with a spine up to 2 centimeters long. The plant produces an inflorescence 3 to 4 meters tall with many flowers along the branches. The flowers are greenish with purple or brown tips and are up to 7.5 centimeters long. The fruit is a woody capsule 5 to 7 centimeters long containing seeds but these are rarely produced with the flowers aborting before the fruits form. Despite being untended for more than 500 years Hohokam agave continue to grow at a few old archaeological sites. This agave produces only by bulbils and hybridizes with Agave chrysantha in Arizona. Agaves collected from the wild were an important source of food for Native Americans for thousands of years. However, in the 1980s archaeologists discovered that large areas of agave especially Agave murpheyi had been cultivated by the Hohokam people in the Tucson Basin, near the city of Marana. Seventy-eight square kilometers (almost 20,000 acres) of former agave fields have been discovered mostly between Phoenix and Tucson indicating that the agave was a major source of food for the Hohokam who numbered in the tens of thousands. Undoubtedly many other fields have been destroyed or are undetected by archaeologists. Agave was cultivated by the Hohokam in the desert of the Tucson basin in rocky areas above the floodplain of the Santa Cruz river where more water-dependent crops were grown.