During the Postclassic El Polvoron phase, people lived in dispersed "ranch"-style villages of shallow pit houses. Social and climatic factors led to a decline and partial abandonment of the area after a.d. Shell and other exotic trade continued, but on a smaller scale than during the Preclassic. Polychrome pottery appeared, and inhumation burial replaced cremation. Platform mounds were built at regular intervals along river and irrigation canal systems, suggesting these sites were administrative centers allocating water and coordinating canal labor.
Aboveground adobe houses were grouped into walled compounds surrounding rectangular, earthen platform mounds. Mexican influences are seen in the presence of ball courts, copper bells made using the lost-wax casting technique, macaws, and cotton textiles.Ĭhanges in settlement patterns, architecture, ceramics, burial practices, and trade relations occurred during the Classic period. The Preclassic reached its zenith during the Sedentary phase, when Hohokam culture extended from northern Mexico in the south to Flagstaff, Arizona, in the north. The Hohokams cremated their dead and sometimes placed the remains inside ceramic vessels. Exotic artifacts of the Hohokams include: groundstone palettes, bowls, and figurines baked-clay figurines carved and acid-etched Pacific marine shell jewelry iron pyrite mirrors and turquoise mosaics. Frogs, lizards, birds, and other animals were commonly depicted on pottery as well as in shell and stone. They produced buff, brown, and red-painted pottery using the paddle-and-anvil technique. They built extensive networks of irrigation canals along the Salt and Gila Rivers. The Hohokams grew maize, squash, cotton, beans, agave, and tobacco. Public architecture included ball courts and mounds capped with caliche. Houses were clustered together around courtyards with associated work areas, trash mounds, and cemeteries. During the Preclassic (Pioneer, Colonial, and Sedentary phases), the Hohokams lived in semi-subterranean pit house villages. The Hohokam culture emerged from this substrate. The Red Mountain phase predates the Pioneer period, and the El Polvoron phase post-dates the Classic period.īy the beginning of the first millennium a.d., prehistoric hunters and gatherers in southern Arizona had begun to experiment with agriculture and to settle in small villages along the major river systems. Hohokam chronology is subdivided into four periods: Pioneer (a.d. Since the 1980s, knowledge of the Hohokams has greatly expanded as a result of cultural resource management archaeology projects conducted in the Phoenix and Tucson basins. The Hohokam cultural sequence initially was defined at the site of Snaketown in the lower Gila Valley southeast of Phoenix, by the early twentieth century archaeologists Harold Gladwin and Emil Haury. The name Hohokam means "those who have gone" in the language of the O'odham, the contemporary Native American inhabitants of southern Arizona.
HOHOKAM is the name given by archaeologists to a prehistoric culture centered along the Salt, Gila, Verde, and Santa Cruz Rivers in the low, hot Sonoran desert of southern Arizona between approximately 300 b.c.
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