The people of the Hohokam culture lived in the Phoenix area from about 100 AD to 1400 AD. They built houses, made pottery and jewelry, used a religion dependent upon animals and rain, and are most well known for their really big canal irrigiation system that was built entirely with human labor using sticks and stone hoes.
Stanley explored some of the MATERIAL CULTURE (those objects and things left by prehistoric people) of the Hohokam people.
Stanley poses with some of the Red-on-buff pottery made by people in the Hohokam culture.
Can you see pictures of dogs, birds, people, and other animals depicted on the pottery fragments? These pots were made about 700 A.D.
Stanley found this fragment on the right at the Mesa Grande Ruin. It is also a Red-on-buff fragment of pottery. We call these sherds. A sherd is a fragment of pottery. You might confuse them with shards, which are broken pieces of glass. Stanley left this fragment at the site right where he found it.
Here is Stanley posing with a large Hohokam jar. We call this a Gila Shoulder shaped jar because of its distinctive shape. It is possible that this large jar sat in a shallow pit and then the liquid contents were accessible with a scoop. How many people could you feed with a jar this big?
The photo above is Stanley standing with some pottery from the Four Corners area. That means the place where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet to create a spot where you can stand in the four corners of each state at the same time. The prehistoric people that lived in this area are called the Ancestral Pueblo (you might have heard them called the Anasazi people). The Ancestral Pueblo people made a distinctive black and white pottery that they traded to the Hohokam people. Sometimes we find fragments of black and white pottery in Phoenix! Can you find a map and figure out how many miles that pottery traveled from the Four Corners to Phoenix?
Here Stanley is showing you some real Hohokam jewelry made from different kinds of shell. The shell with red decoration is etched and then painted with a red mineral pigment. The designs on the shells sometimes match the designs on the pottery. Compare this shell design with that on the Gila Shoulder jar pictured above... are they similar? How are they different?
The little shell at Stan's feet is a carved figure of a frog. Then there are bracelets and strands of shells used as necklaces. There are a couple of close up photos below.
This is a woman from the Pima tribe, also called O'odham. She works at the Huhugam Heritage Center and has sent along a brochure about it. People of the Pima tribe consider the Hohokam to be their ancestors. This woman helped Stanley make his own shell jewelry. The Hohokam also used turquoise inlay on their shell to make designs. The design that she helped Stanley make is of a snake. This Shell necklace should be in your package with Stanley.
This is a map of the Hohokam canal system. The Salt River flows through what is now Phoenix. In Hohokam times that Salt River was the most important water source for the Hohokam people living around the Phoenix Basin. This map was created by Dr. Omar Turney in 1929.
The Salt River is the really big river shown running from west to east on the map. All of the other lines drawn from the river to the north and the south are canal ditches. These canals were dug by hand by the Hohokam farmers to get water from the river to their fields. This is very important, because Phoenix is a very dry desert that only gets a couple of inches of rain per year.
Some of these canals are twenty miles long and fifty feet across!
They were maintained by a community of farmers that cooperated with one another so everyone could get their share of the water to grow food. This was the largest water control system in North America in prehistoric times. What is even more amazing, there does not seem to have been any king or single person in charge of making sure the whole system worked! The people worked together to create this amazing water system.
Some of these canals were so well built that when the American settlers moved into Phoenix in the 1800's they reused the same canal ditches built by the Hohokam Indians. The canals had been abandoned for almost 400 years and they were still really good!
When Stanley went to the Park of the Canals in Mesa, he saw some of the ancient Hohokam canals that are no longer being used. This one is really big! A grown adult cannot jump across this ditch, he would land about midway. If this canal was full of water, it would be like a large stream and would be very difficult to cross.
Here are the remains of a Hohokam house at the Park of the Canals. Can you see the outline of the building? Here also is an artist's drawing of what a Hohokam family might have lived in. We call this a courtyard group where four or five houses all face a central plaza. The desert sun is very hot, and there were probably many sun shades built around the houses and work areas. The drawing below was created by Jon Joha in 1983.
There are many archaeological sites preserved, like those at the Park of the Canals, but there are many more sites that are destroyed. Here is a link to a newspaper article about this problem (Link)
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