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Water for personal use was a limiting factor for the prehistoric and historic indigenous peoples who inhabited the extremely arid North American region of south-western Arizona and north-western Sonora, known as Papagueria. This paper lists and quantifies the perennial and intermittent water resources available to them. In the 16,824 km(2) study area of the Sonoran Desert, there were 128 waterholes, most of them in the mountains and, when full, these offered at least 3,099,141 1 of water. At today’s precipitation levels, virtually all points of the region were accessible to inhabitants within a 40 km radius of one or more water sources. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited