Arizona

B

Legislative

The legislature is divided into the 30-member Senate and the 60-member House of Representatives. Legislators serve two-year terms.

C

Judicial

Arizona’s highest court, the Supreme Court, is composed of five justices who serve six-year terms. The intermediate court of appeals has judges who serve six-year terms, and the major trial courts, the superior courts, have judges who serve four-year terms. Supreme Court justices and court of appeals judges are appointed by the governor.

D

Local Government

Arizona’s 15 counties are the local unit of government. Each county generally has a board of three supervisors. Supervisors are elected for two-year terms. Other elected county officials are the sheriff, county attorney, clerk of the superior court, assessor, recorder, and superintendent of schools.

Arizona has both unincorporated cities controlled by the counties and incorporated cities governing themselves, usually under a mayor and council. The larger cities, such as Phoenix and Tucson, have the council and city manager system.

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E

National Representation

Arizona elects two U.S. senators and eight members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The state casts ten electoral votes in presidential elections.

VIII

History

A

Early Inhabitants

The first humans in present-day Arizona appeared more than 12,000 years ago. Archaeologists have found evidence that the original peoples hunted and gathered food with a few crude stone tools and probably built no permanent dwellings.

About 2,000 years ago, people whom archaeologists now call the Anasazi settled on the plateaus of northwestern Arizona. As they left the nomadic lifestyle, the Anasazi lived in multiroomed houses built into caves and built kiva, circular buildings used for ceremonial purposes. In the mountains of eastern Arizona lived a people now called the Mogollon, who borrowed elements of their culture from both plateau and desert peoples.

About ad 300 an agricultural people called the Hohokam arrived in the river valleys of central Arizona. They planted corn and devised a system of irrigation to bring water to their crops. In the plateau country, Anasazi also learned to grow corn, squash, and cotton. However, the plateau peoples farmed without the aid of irrigation, using rainwater instead. From 700 to 1100 these peoples developed, to a very high level, the arts of building, cotton weaving, and pottery making. The Hohokam and the Anasazi reached the height of their civilizations between 1100 and 1300. Most of their great multiple-roomed cliff houses were built toward the end of this period.

In the 13th century a prolonged drought reduced the food supply and available farmland. After 1300 the population decreased and the area of habitation shrank. When the Spanish arrived in the 16th century, they found the distribution of native peoples largely as it is today, except for the Navajo and Apache, nomadic peoples who migrated into the area shortly before the arrival of the Spanish.

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