The religion associated with platform mounds was probably less inclusive than that associated with ballcourts. Ceremonies conducted on top of these “platform mounds” were visible to spectators below. By 1250, these large, solid edifices with flat surfaces were common at large villages across the Hohokam world. Rituals associated with raised mounds first developed in the Greater Phoenix area. That cessation, and the new ritual architecture that began to appear, signal important but as yet poorly understood changes in religious, economic, and social life. Villagers changed how they were living on the landscape, and communities ceased using ballcourts, though not all at once. Watching or participating in ball games brought people together, and it provided opportunities to visit with friends and family and trade raw materials and finished goods.įrom 1075 to 1250 was a time of great transition.

These open-air facilities suggest connections, probably indirect, with Mexico. 750 to 1075, people excavated large oval basins that archaeologists call “ballcourts.” The excavated earth formed raised berms around the sunken courts. 500, families arranged their courtyard groups around a central plaza area.Īt most large villages dating from A.D. In larger villages dating after about A.D. Villagers arranged their dwellings in courtyard groups, such that doorways faced each other and opened onto a common central area with shared features-storage pits, ramadas, outdoor ovens, and other facilities. Wooden posts and beams formed structures that builders covered with grass and adobe. Initially, Hohokam dwellings were “pithouses.” People dug shallow pits and built houses in them. Just as the O’odham see a Huhugam continuum, archaeologists have verified that Hohokam traditions were rooted in a much deeper past in the Sonoran Desert. We are beginning to see the origins of Hohokam irrigation technology among much earlier communities along the Santa Cruz River in Tucson, where maize dates back to 2200 B.C., and probably earlier. The magnitude of these systems is best attested in the Phoenix area, where hundreds of miles of canals tapped the life-sustaining waters of the Gila and Salt Rivers. Notably, Hohokam communities built extensive canal systems to water vast fields of corn, beans, squash, and cotton. Unique styles of decorated pottery, specific architectural traditions, and other shared customs distinguish these ancestral people from their neighbors. Over a millennium, farmers, craftspeople, and traders established large, permanent villages in the river valleys of central and southern Arizona. Still, it is important to understand that what archaeologists identify materially as “Hohokam” more likely represents an ideology-a way of thinking-that itself varied across the Hohokam landscape and across those thousand years. 400 to 1450-which researchers call “Hohokam”-as something distinct from what came before and what followed.

Archaeologists recognize the material culture of the ancestors who lived from about A.D. Red-painted linear designs appear to derive from older Southwestern basketry weaving the diagonal pattern on this vessel is created by vertically linked, parallel lines of scrolls.O’odham peoples of the Sonoran Desert refer to their ancestors, from time immemorial to the present, as Huhugam. They formed ceramic vessels by coiling clay rolls and finished them in the “paddle-and-anvil” technique, supporting the inside of a vessel with a smooth stone or fingers, while working the outer surface with a paddle. 300, along the Gila and Salt rivers in the southern Arizona desert, the Hohokam people were building pithouse villages and irrigation canals, slowly changing their way of life from hunting and gathering to a more sedentary existence. Pottery making reached the Southwest from western Mexico. Shoulder Cauldron with Diagonal Basketry Pattern, AD 950/1150, Hohokam, Sacaton Red-on-Buff, Southern Arizona Hohokam Pottery, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Hohokam pottery