At first glance, you’d be forgiven for mistaking Scottsdale for a city without depth. Here, in the primordial expanse of the Sonoran Desert in southwestern Arizona, first impressions are of a town adorned with all the hallmarks of generic modernity: luxury spas, high-end fashion outlets, sprinkler-fed golf courses. But you’ll find that Scottsdale’s history stretches further than its immaculate surface implies — further even than the history of the United States. Long before it became known as a haven for the rich and famous — before the first guest ranches sprang up in the 1890s, and the city’s first settlers planted their orchards in the red earth — this land played host to Pueblo Ultimo, one of a string of ancient Indigenous settlements that thrived along the Salt and Gila rivers.
It was the home of the Hohokam, or ‘those who have disappeared’, a long-vanished people who irrigated the desert with canals, bringing life to the dust before abandoning such villages in the 14th and 15th centuries. They may be gone, but their reverence for the desert landscape has been taken up by the artists enamoured with Scottsdale’s big skies, and architects who, in the oblivion of the surrounding desert,
