Who were the Hohokam, where did they come from, where did they go?
We used to think prehistoric populations a good deal more mysterious than we do today. The "Vanished Civilizations" of best-sellers and popular movies have themselves vanished.
Where did the Hohokam come from?
They were here already.
Where did they go to?
They're still here.
It's a bit like asking where did the Victorians go? A vanished civilization? Did they disappear mysteriously? No, we just moved on. We wear different clothes; we believe different things. But they were our grandparents, so to speak.
Hohokam is the name textbooks give to the Native Americans who lived in the watershed of the Gila, Salt, Verde, San Pedro and Santa Cruz rivers in southern and central Arizona from the years 600 to 1450, when they developed an urban society built around irrigated agriculture, watered by an elaborate canal system.
Hohokam means "all used up," or "gone," in the language of the Akimel O'odham, or Pima peoples, and sometimes is translated as "those who came before." Grandparents, so to speak.
Like Victorian, Hohokam isn't necessarily an ethnic designation but a cultural one. They shared certain ideas that show up in their ruins, their pottery and their petroglyphs. We don't know whether they even all spoke the same language.
But there is quite a bit we can know, or at least surmise, from the physical evidence.
"We have more than 700 architectural ruins just in the city of Phoenix," says Todd Bostwick, retired archaeologist for the city.
And there are more in Mesa, Tempe and elsewhere, mostly within hailing distance of the river.
You can see the remains of one of the major population centers at Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, where a ceremonial mound and many walls and foundations have been unearthed. There also are pots, jewelry, tools and other implements from the time.
The story they tell is of a population stable over many centuries of constant growth, and with commercial ties outside the area and a cohesive political organization.
When we consider these prehistoric civilizations, we have a tendency to romanticize them, to make them essentially different from us. But they weren't. They were people who raised families, built additions to their homes, had mothers-in-law and knew how to shop.
Marvel of engineering
And it was a genuine civilization. Too often when we think of the Hohokam canal system, we imagine a few ditches dug here and there.
"These canals were huge," says Jerry Howard, curator of anthropology at the Arizona Museum of Natural History in Mesa. "They were monumental."
One canal in Mesa was 15 feet deep and more than 30 feet wide.
"That's monstrous," Howard says. "It's an extraordinary effort of engineering and social organization."
The longest canal stretched 20 miles, and there were 1,000 miles of canals in the Salt- and Gila-river basins over a period of 1,400 years, used at different times. By about A.D. 800, they irrigated more than 100,000 acres of Hohokam farmland.
"In its engineering and size, the canal system is bigger and more sophisticated than any irrigation in the prehistoric New World," Howard says. "The only thing that rivals it is on the desert coast of Peru, and those canals aren't as large."
The engineering truly is awesome.
"They were able to map these canal systems onto the topography and get drops, or gradients, as little as 1 or 2 feet in a mile," he says. "They are brilliantly engineered.
"What we're seeing with the Hohokam is almost a state level of organization."
Yet, the old belief that the culture was divided into a strict class system under a king or chief seems to be mistaken.
"The old theory was that the platform mounds (at Pueblo Grande and Mesa Grande) were where the chief lived," Bostwick says. "But there's not too many that accept that idea anymore. We are not finding any chiefs."
Instead, the society seems to have been organized, almost like ancient Rome, by family groups, or lineages, headed by a paterfamilias. The paterfamilias would meet with his peers to negotiate the group governance.
"The heads of lineages would be land owners and want to make sure the land is passed on to their heirs," Bostwick says. "They would be involved in the rituals to preserve the agricultural cycles, and to make decisions and form councils. And just as important was the distribution of water."
There were about 16 canal systems, each with a headgate on the river, and the family that controlled the headgate controlled the use of water in that canal system.
"In a year of low flow, they decide who gets water and who doesn't," Bostwick says. "It wasn't one person; it was more than one lineage, so there is a corporate structure."
Not quite like a modern corporation but closer to it than to the old idea of a tribal chieftain or a priestly ruling class. In this, it was much like modern political organization among many Pueblo peoples, where elders share authority.
"Maybe we should start with families and build upward, rather than start with leaders and build down," Bostwick says. "Pueblo societies rarely find chiefs that had total control of villages, but had various individuals or groups that had different power bases - ritual, agricultural, etcetera.
"The local-control model allowed them to develop large urban societies with 50 miles of canals. You don't need central control."
It allowed a buildup of population.
"Population levels are debated," Bostwick says, "But there's a range, from 24,000 to 50,000 in the Phoenix basin, which would have been one of the sizable Native populations in the New World."
And larger than Paris in A.D. 1000.
The core of that population was urban, Bostwick says.
"And estimates range up to a thousand people in a single village."
They traded with other cultures, from California to Kansas, and from cultures to the north and into central Mexico. There are seashells from the Gulf of California and copper bells from central Mexico (the Hohokam never developed metallurgy).
"I think of them as more Meso-American," Howard says. "We think of them as being like the Anasazi or the Sinagua cultures, but the Hohokam are closer to Mexican in lifestyle and diet, more similar to the people of the south than those to the east or north. They had platform mounds and ball courts; the other groups didn't."
The ball courts - there is one at Pueblo Grande - served not only as a sports arena, but as a place of ritual. For many Native American peoples, ballgames have religious significance and were likely held at specific times of year.
"Not every village has a ball court," Bostwick says, "only the major villages. And recent theory holds that ball courts would have created an opportunity for markets."
That continues to be true today for many Third World cultures, where a festival is built around an athletic contest, such as the Central Asian sport of buzkashi, and people come from all around to gather for the event.
"You bring the craft goods you'd made that year, and it's a great time to meet people beyond your own village," Bostwick says. "A place to acquire the materials that were not locally available."
And the Hohokam exported cotton.
"They were the earliest cotton growers in the Southwest. Because cotton prefers warm weather, with the irrigation this area was ideal for cotton."
Where are they today?
So, what happened to them?
"The Hohokam phased out about 1450," Howard says. "But the reason for the collapse is probably not an isolated occurrence, not a single deathblow."
There were a series of devastating floods in the mid-1300s, after which the canals were not cared for as well as they had been. Populations seem to have grown beyond the ability of agriculture to support them, at least in concentrated urban settings.
"We know there were a series of droughts in the north, forcing ancestral Pueblo peoples to migrate south, and even more people came into the Valley and maybe there was also political conflicts," Bostwick says. "That could be reflected in the Pima myths.
"Keep in mind that Native Americans don't use the word 'abandonment.' It is not so much abandonment as it is depopulation."
With less food available, nutrition suffered and birthrates declined. Villages broke up, and their inhabitants moved into the desert once again.
"It wasn't a big bang," Bostwick says. "It happened over several generations."
The Pima peoples now live in the historic shadow of the Hohokam.
"Pima and Hohokam farm the same way. The lifestyle is very similar, the pottery is quite similar. Whether it's continuity or revival, the style is the same.
"If not the Pima, then who?"
Reach the reporter at firstname.lastname@example.org or 602-444-8823.
A replicated pit house along the interpretive trail at the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix. The site was abandoned by the Hohokam around 1450.
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