How Craft, Culture, and Survival Shaped a Desert Civilization
Discover the vibrant art, sophisticated technology, and deep cultural legacy of the ancient Hohokam people in this engaging presentation held by docent Mary Jo McMullen. From beautifully designed polychrome pottery and intricate shell jewelry to advanced regional canal systems, explore how this early desert dwellers infused everyday life with remarkable artistry. McMullen highlights the invaluable field notes of Oracle pioneer Alice Hubbard Carpenter and examines the vital connections between archaeological findings and the oral histories of descendant tribes. Dive into this fascinating educational journey and see how the spirit of Southwest tradition continues to thrive today. Filmed November 19, 2025, by Mark Headley.
Watch this video, Introduction to the Hohokam and Their Craft Traditions
Devon Sloan: Good morning, everybody. My name is Devon Sloan. I’m secretary on the board of the Oro Valley Historical Society. We are very glad you’re here. Thank you so much for coming. Come on in. And here is Dick Eggerding,, one of the founders of the Oro Valley Historical Society. Wonderful crowd. Well, they knew you were going to be here. Anyway, we’re glad you’re here. I think you’re really going to enjoy this presentation. Mary Joe is a docent at Tohono Chul and at the Tucson Museum of Art. So, she knows stuff and she’s going to share that with us today. But first, we have a commercial from our filmographer. You want to talk?
Mark Headley: Yeah, I don’t need a microphone. Okay. I’m used to being on set where you have to yell loud. My name is Mark Headley. Headley International. We do a lot of films here in southern Arizona and also Los Angeles. This is my son, Sean Marcus Headley. Okay. And we’ll be filming. Now, we’re not going to be filming the audience unless there’s some Academy Award-winning actors here. Okay. And actually, I’d like to introduce Bob over here, president. You want to stand up of the Oro Valley Historic Society. So, anyway, let’s get on with it.
Devon Sloan: Okay, here we go. Mary Jo, it’s all yours.
Mary Jo McMullen: Great. Well, good morning everybody and I really thank you for coming out. This should be a fun morning. When I was taught to tell a story, I always learned the five W’s: Who, what, when, where, and why. So, that’s where we’re going to be starting today. And we’re going to start with two whys. And the first one is, why me? She just told you I volunteer at Tohono Chul. I volunteer at the art museum. What does that have to do with the Hohokam? Well, when we look at a piece of pottery, it really depends on who’s doing the looking. So, I am not an archaeologist. I will not be talking potsherds. I did an eight-week class on the Hopi migration that was done all in potsherds. I swore I would never talk about pots. I will give you a little bit on one or two of the slides about how an archaeologist would look at a piece, but that’s as far as we’re going to go with it.
An anthropologist is looking more at culture. So, they’re saying, “Well, it’s a really big pot, so they must have had good harvests.” Or “Look at the size of the serving bowl. They must have been having parties.” That’s not me either. I’m an art museum docent. I came from the Midwest. When I came down here, I started trying to learn a little bit about the history of the area and include the pun. If you dig back far enough, you get to the Hohokam. And so that’s why I’m here.
The other why is think about last summer. It was hot. You went from your air-conditioned house to your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned store, back to your air-conditioned house, and you were worn out. So, the climate was a bit milder during the Hohokam time. But basically, they were still in hot desert and they had to grow the cotton to make the cloth to make their clothing and grow their food and make their houses. And they did all this with no metal implements, no tools, no wheels. It was basically stones and sticks. Why in the world would you take the extra time to make things pretty? And I hope to answer that question at the end.
So, hitting our W’s again: Who and when. Since you’re all here for the historical society, I assume that some of you will have this stuff like on the top of your head. But for the rest of us who are kind of novices to the area, the first people in the Americas were referred to as Paleo-Indians. Now, when they got here is constantly being changed. So, when I started taking archaeology classes 10 years ago down here, they were still talking about Clovis first and about 13,000 to 15,000 years ago. You may have read in the news about coming up with the footprints out at White Sands and those are thought to be 22,000 to 23,000 years old. Although there’s still some controversy about that. Three weeks ago, there was an article published in a reputable journal by an archaeologist who said the first people in the Americas came from an island in Japan 28,000 years ago. Now, that one, you know, is going to need some more looking at, but these were basically the big game hunters right at the end of the Ice Age. So, mammoths and mastodons and all that fun stuff.
Well, about 8,000 years ago, the climate changed and the big game went away and so people had to learn how to get their food, hunting smaller animals—basically rabbits, squirrels, prairie dogs, occasionally sheep or deer. But they also started doing a lot more gathering. So they were getting their calories from fruits and nuts and berries and grasses. And also at the same time down in Mexico, the population down there had learned how to cultivate maize. And so through trade routes and migrations and that, they started doing a little bit of farming during that Archaic period. And in the middle Archaic period, they actually have found corn being grown up on Tumamoc Hill over 4,500 years BCE. So, Tucson is actually the oldest continuously inhabited area in the United States. So, if you didn’t know that that’s a fact to take home with you. That’s one of those fun facts.
By the end of the Archaic period we were seeing a bit more agriculture, and when you are trying to grow crops you have to stay there and water them and keep the critters out and that sort of thing. So we started to see people becoming a little bit more sedentary. But now we get to the Hohokam. So the Hohokam are noted for a lot of things but agriculture was one of the two really big ones with their irrigation system. We used to say that the Hohokam culture was 450 CE to 1450 CE. Now that 1450 number is still good. There’s been a big change pushing that earlier number back. So we’re probably talking about maybe 200 CE. I know a few archaeologists who will even go back to like zero. So somewhere between, you know, 1,200 to 1,500 years of Hohokam culture and we’ll talk about why that change occurred when we talk about Snaketown in just a couple minutes.
So protohistoric would be what the Spanish called the Pima and the Papago people. We now know them as the O’odham people. They had a language and an oral history but they didn’t have a written language and so that’s referred to as protohistoric. And then after the Spanish started coming in and started recording things, that’s known as the historic period. Just an interesting fact: In 1300, so towards the end of the Hohokam period, there were 40,000 people living between the Phoenix and Tucson basins. 500 years later, in 1892, the population was only 60,000. So it didn’t really go up that much. This was a huge population for the size of the area.
Want to talk a minute about culture. Culture refers to an archaeological term, not an individual tribe or clan. So people from different groups could all be part of the same culture if it was a pattern of behavior that people passed along from one generation to the next. So when we say Hohokam culture, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re not supposed to use the term Hohokam people. The Gila River Indian Community requests that we use “ancestral Sonoran Desert people.” I’m going to be calling them Hohokam because I’ve done it for 10 years and I’m too old to change my ways. Huhugam is everybody that came before. So, it includes the Hohokam, but it includes the people that were here before them—the Archaic people, which was known as the Cochise culture, the Hohokam, and then the O’odham. So, anybody who’s already dead is Huhugam, and we’re all going to be there.
Want to talk for a minute about Snaketown. So, Snaketown is an area about 40-some miles south of Phoenix on the Gila Indian Reservation. There was an entrepreneur from Globe who got interested in this red-on-brown pottery and so he hired a young archaeologist named Emil Haury to dig up Snaketown. So this was the first big archaeological dig and he found all sorts of really fantastic stuff. But although he accurately documented what he found, he didn’t interpret it correctly because at the time that was the first big excavation and it dated to 450. So he said, “Well, the Hohokam must have come to this area in 450.” And we know that they didn’t start here because the pottery is so advanced that you don’t start out making pottery making it advanced. You start out making simple pottery and then learn over time. Since he didn’t have anything to compare it with, he said, “Well, this must be people who came from western Mexico.” And he also based that on the fact that they had ball courts, they had irrigation systems, they had copper bells. And so, there’s even a book written called The Hohokam Millennium that goes from 450 to 1450.
What has happened is Tucson, as you know, there’s state laws that say if you’re going to build an area or do a development, you have to do a cultural resource evaluation first. So you have to hire a company to go in and look for earlier cultures. If you’ve been around Tucson for the last four or five years, you probably remember Tucson Electric was putting in a new plant at I-10 and Ina. And when they did that dig, they found footprints that were way older. And they invited people to come down. You could go walk around, look at the footprints. They started digging further and they found that in the Tucson area, we had an irrigation system from at least 200. We had pots from the year 50. We had the maize agriculture. So the Hohokam culture actually started here in Tucson and moved up to the Gila River.
The difference is that Tucson was continuously inhabited. So after the Hohokam were gone, you had the O’odham people, you had the Spanish, you had the Mexicans, you had the Americans. So the evidence was buried. Whereas when westerners—or when people from the East Coast—came out to the West, they could see the irrigation systems up along the Gila and Salt River. Matter of fact, the ranchers used to use those irrigation systems. So they thought that that was, you know, the main area. And so that’s why there’s that bit of confusion.
If you were to go to Snaketown today, first of all, you would get arrested because it’s on the Gila Indian Reservation and it’s totally closed off to white people. And secondly, all you would see desert because most archaeologists these days cover over their sites. So, Emil Haury was not only there in the 1930s, he was also there in the 1960s. At that point he was a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona. He was the director of the Arizona State Museum. It was a much more formal dig. He did an entire book about his findings which I have up here someplace. So, if you want to look afterwards, you can take a look at what he did. Where were the Hohokam people?
Okay. Tucson, Phoenix, Hohokam, Ancestral Puebloan or Anasazi—much larger but not as large a population and not nearly as sophisticated in their pottery. Mogollon were over here. Patayan over here, we have Casas Grandes, the Trincheras, the Sinagua, but that border wasn’t there. We have Trincheras clear up in Marana that we know for sure. We have Hohokam down in the Altar River Valley in Mexico. We have Hohokam up in the Sinagua area. So, this is the most used and really the best map, but it’s not completely accurate.
So, we’re coming to the fun part now. What makes Hohokam Hohokam? Individual pit houses, communal architecture, cremation, canals and agriculture, and crafts—particularly their ceramics. And if you know the term red-on-buff, you know that you can identify Hohokam ceramics. So, you don’t have to look at sherds and designs. If it’s red-on-buff, it’s Hohokam. Their irrigation system was like none anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. They had single canals that were over 20 miles long coming off the Salt River. And it was all dug with hands and stone tools and sticks. Their worldviews—there are some archaeologists who will give you an entire discussion of their worldviews based on their interpretation of petroglyphs or designs. I’m not going to go there because I don’t think that’s really valid.
Individual pit houses: You would dig into this soil like one to three feet. You’d stick posts up on the four corners and sometimes along in the middle. Early on, most of the pit houses’ doors open to the south. But you’ll see later as we start developing family groups and then villages that where the door pointed was more to like a plaza area rather than a particular location. So, there would be a sloping entrance here. There would be a fire pit here. And it’s easier to see in this photograph. Obviously, this is not Hohokam, but people were still living pretty much the same way. This is a pit house, but this one is now round. And you can see how they would add branches from bushes or trees and then put in bushes or mats or some sort of material. Eventually this would get covered over with mud and those were the individual houses, and they changed over time.
So think about it—it’s easy, this one: The American Revolution, 1776, people were living in individual houses. They were made of wood, sometimes of stone. They traveled by horse and by foot. There was some industrialization. They had the use of metal. They had factories that were able to make clothing. Fast forward 250 years. We’re traveling in cars, planes, boats. We’re having our cloth come from China or Japan or Vietnam. We’re making things out of microchips and have cell phones. That’s 250 years. The Hohokam were around for over a thousand years. So, there’s going to be changes in how they do things. But basically, those simple things like individual houses and communal structures and irrigation systems pretty much stayed the same.
When I talk about communal structures, what I’m talking about are things that the whole community had to get together and agree to decide to build. So this is a ball court. I think this is the San Pedro River. Sometimes if you were a large enough village, you would have your own ball court. Down along the San Pedro, there might be four or five villages that would have one big ball court. We use the term ball court because in Mexico and Mesoamerica, we know that there were ball games played there. We think there were probably ball games played here as well, but it was also used for dances or feasts or just to get everybody together to discuss things because the Hohokam initially were very egalitarian. Everybody had a say in what was going on. A picture of a ball court.
This is in Marana, this is a platform mound. So after the ball courts, the next phase of Hohokam development, they started doing these platform mounds and they started out basically as just an area where there was a hill, you added more dirt and debris, kind of packed it down so it was level at the top. People could come up there and again discuss things, have dances, have feasts, whatever. Eventually they started building homes on top of the platform mounds. You also had these compound walls. So you would have, say, an extended family group and they each have their own home with a plaza out in the middle. And then we think this was somewhat for defense, but we don’t really know that for a fact.
And then the final kind of communal structures were the great houses. When the people coming in from the East Coast got to Arizona, there were probably about 17 or 18 of these still up in the Arizona area. This one happened to get protected by the federal government. And so today, we only have one great house. This is the one up in Coolidge. And hopefully now that the federal government’s opening up again, you can go up and actually go through this. They do a great tour. And you can see both the great house and some of the stuff that they were using for astronomy and homes that were around in that area as well.
We mentioned cremation. Cremation was unique to the Hohokam. None of the other cultures that were around at the same time—so like the Patayan and the Mogollon, the ones that we looked at—all of them did burials. Toward the end of the Hohokam era, they went back to burials as well. But early on, they would cremate the body. They would then put the bones that remained into a pot. They would bury the pot with stone axe heads and some other kinds of ceramics that we’ll be looking at in a minute.
But the big thing that allowed the Hohokam to last as long as they did, be as successful as they were, be able to have the kind of population they had, was their agriculture, and this was based on an irrigation system. They got the maize up from Mexico. They planted beans and squash but they also are believed to have domesticated at least 14 other plants. So, amaranth, small barley, cotton, tobacco—all of these plants the Hohokam learned how to use. Big things that they’re known for are their crafts and their irrigation system. And I’m not going to talk to you anymore about irrigation and agriculture. We’re going to get into the fun stuff.
So, you want to know how to make a pot? If you’re doing agriculture, you need pots to keep your grain, to keep seeds for the next year, to keep the critters out. They used to just dig a big hole and put stones around it and try to put their stuff there, and the critters got to it most of the time. So, you had to learn how to make pots. So, they started out making baskets and then they started learning how to make a pot.
And there are three things Hohokam pottery is noted for. One is the way they made their pots. And I’m going to show you this: It’s called the anvil and paddle method. They’re the only culture that did this. The second thing they’re known for are the different shapes or forms of their pottery. If you use traditional coiling for pottery, you can make a pot, you can make a bowl, you can make a pitcher, but that’s about all you could make. By using the anvil and paddle you can make a lot more forms and we’ll look at the forms. The third thing they’re known for is their designs on their pottery. So here just to give you a smattering, that’s called a scoop, a censer, a plate, a bowl. There’s a couple of animal effigies and we’ll be looking at all of this a lot more.
So the first thing you have to do is quarry the clay. And this was the downfall of Hohokam pottery. The clay in the southeastern part of Arizona is crap. And the pots break. They break when you’re firing them. They break afterwards. In Snaketown, they were making 14,000 pieces of ceramics per year just to keep up with the increase in population and the breakage and trade. So, you know, as hard as these potters worked and as beautiful as their work was, it just didn’t last. But they did what they could.
They took the pottery, they would gather tempering material. Now, tempering material is usually stone that you grind up real fine. You mix it in with your clay and it allows it to fire more evenly and it gives it—the one fancy word we’re going to use—increased tensile strength. So, it makes it stronger and hopefully last longer. You need to prepare the clay. You need to get all the organic material and the stones and other stuff that are mixed in with it out. You get it down to the consistency you want. So you let it drain out for a while and then you shape your vessel. Allow it to dry.
If you’re going to use a slip, this is when you put a slip on. So slip is just a real thin, runny clay that you mix with something with color. And for the Hohokam, this was generally something called hematite. And we’ll look at that mineral. Hematite was the friend of the Hohokam. They used it on their pottery. They used it on their clothing. They used it in their jewelry. They used it to color their own body. Hematite was theirs. Now, hematite’s found all over the Southwest and the other cultures used it as well, but not to this extent. So, if you’re making a slip, you’re going to mix some ground-up hematite with some clay that’s really ruddy and just kind of paint all over it, or you could even like dip your pot into it to get the pot to take on a reddish color.
You would then have to gather fuel. You dig a pit, you put some stones in the pit, you’d start your fire, and you put your pot in there and hope it didn’t break before you got it back out again. If it worked, in the meantime, you’re gathering plants and materials to use to make paint. You prepare the paint, and then once the pot cools off, you paint your pot.
Anvil and paddle refers to using a stone or a piece of wood inside as what they called the anvil and then a piece of wood on the outside to actually shape the piece. All potters, including the Hohokam, would start with a rope of clay and they would make a base, but the rest of the potters just kept using that rope and winding it around. The Hohokam actually went in with the clay and molded it by hand.
So the jar to your left that says corrugated, that’s a Mogollon brown ware corrugated pot. And all they did was take a rope of clay, kept wrapping it around till they got the size they wanted. And then they would pinch those together with their thumbs and that’s how you get corrugated pottery. And we talked about that big brown ware. The next one is from the Anasazi area, that’s called gray ware. All that means is the minerals that were in the clay gave it that color. In the Hohokam area, the clay was either buff or maybe a light brown. So red-on-brown or red-on-buff was Hohokam.
You can see with the gray ware jar, they did the same thing. They took those ropes of clay; they wrapped them around. In this case, they smoothed out the bottom. We don’t know whether like corrugation made it heat stuff more evenly so that when they used this to cook stuff that it would work that way for them. We just know that that was a design of theirs. So here we have a plain ware pot. So you see the buff. This does not have a slip on it, but instead it has a painted design of that hematite paint. And this would be called a geometric pattern.
This is from a page from Emil Haury’s book about the dig that he did at Snaketown and all of the different pot styles that he found. So you have bowls here up at the top. You have jars. The difference between a bowl and a jar is that a jar has a narrow opening so you could put a piece of pottery or stone over it and keep the critters out. Some of the bowls they put on little legs. You have animal scoops. You have a clay pipe. You have this guy that we’re going to look at a little bit later. These are called censers. You have animal effigies. You have people on the pots. There were like 40 or 50 different pot styles found up in Snaketown. When we get down to Oracle, we’re going to find a lady who had 73 different pot styles.
Now, I told you I would give you a little bit of what an archaeologist would say. So, reconstructed smudged Gila Red bowl, slipped exterior surface, pattern polishing striations. Interior surface is smudged, tempered with granodiorite from the South Mountain. This is how an archaeologist looks at a pot. I’m just going to point out a couple of things on the pot. You can see that the underlying pottery was buff. It had a red slip on it. These are called fire clouds. And what a fire cloud means is you stick your pot in your firing pit and unfortunately it rolls over on its side. So part of the pot is actually touching the stuff that’s on fire. It leaves smut and soot and gives you these black marks. So, if you’re looking at a really perfect pot, it won’t have any fire clouds. Most of them did. This is hematite. It’s found all over the Southwest. It’s a relatively soft mineral. You can grind it up and use it for coloring pretty much everything.
When you were growing up, think about your kitchen table on a typical family dinner. You were probably eating off of Melmac or plastic plates. You saved the china for when the neighbors were coming or the grandparents or the in-laws, or maybe it was Christmas, some, you know, big big celebration. The Hohokam were no different. 90% of their ceramics are plain wear. They either have nothing on them or they have a slip, but they don’t have decoration.
So, this is a really good example. This one’s got a fire cloud, but it’s just a plain picture that we’re called plainware. And we’re not going to be looking much at plainware. We’re going to be looking at the designs. This is called polychrome. And that just means more than two colors. Toward the end of the whole millennium, a group of people came from the north called the Salado culture, and they mixed with a Hohokam, and a lot of these polychrome bowls were found up around Casa Grande. Now, we don’t know if it was the Salado coming into the area making the polychrome or if the Hohokam said, “Hey, that’s kind of neat stuff,” and they started making it, but we do know we found the bowls towards the end of their time period up in that area. And so, it’s just more than two color. It’s Salado polychrome.
The Hohokam used a variety of decorations. We’re going to be looking at a lot of geometric decorations, but interestingly, the geometrics became more popular later in the culture period. So, the animals and birds and people that we’ll see on pots actually were earlier in the Hohokam culture. I don’t know why, but that’s what they did. We do know they would use like agave or sotol bristles to make brushes. But if you look at this, I can really see taking my finger and dipping it into the paint and painting these symbols. So repetitive geometric patterns.
But then look at this one. Obviously, I didn’t do that with my finger. This is very fine brush work. It would have taken a lot of time to do. In this case, the design is all the interior, and again it’s recurrent geometrics and then line fill. The outside was left plain, and it does have some fire clouds, but the geometric designs could be square, they could be circular, they could be thick lines, thin lines, lots of lines, just a few lines. They pretty much ran the gamut.
This is a ceramic scoop with the circles. Some people will try to tell you that those circles were a maze. They’ll tell you those straight lines actually represented birds. If you have a descendant tribe that can tell you what was meant by earlier designs, that’s great. We have not gotten that kind of information from the O’odham tribes. So like I’m down at TMA, we have a collection of ancient Hopi pottery. What they did was they got modern Hopi potters to come in and say, you know, “Do you have any idea what the symbolism means?” Some of it they had an idea, some of it they were willing to share, some of it they weren’t. But when you get that, and the Zuni do the same thing with some of their petroglyphs, they’ll tell you what some of the petroglyphs mean, but not all of them. So if you have a descendant tribe that’s telling you what this stuff means, I buy that. If you have archaeologists coming with their western mindset and looking at things and telling you what it means, I tend to kind of steer away from that. You know, some people will tell you this is mountains or lightning or rain or snakes. I’ve seen all sorts of interpretations, but just beautifully designed pieces.
This was one of my favorites. This starts out with a bowl. So that coiled pottery initially, but then you go into a trapezoid design, which you would have done by hand. You’ve got a little bit of paint edging at the top and bottom and also at the rim. These shoulders, the anthropologists will tell you, are made to keep stuff from spilling out. So if you’re carrying a big bowl of soup at a feast, you don’t want to lose a lot of it. Again, it’s conjecture, but it at least there’s kind of makes sense.
But look at this design. This is made freehand. This is fairly early in the Hohokam time period. Each of these is connected to the one in front of it. So, you’re working on a diagonal, connecting each one to the one in front of it, and making this perfect design. I just think that’s one of the most incredible pieces I’ve ever seen. They did use human figures. I’m going to bring this one up because this is what you guys probably think of as Kokopelli. Okay, Kokopelli is actually a Hopi Kachina god. And so I prefer to use the term flute player. We know this guy is the god of fertility. He supposedly brought maize from Mesoamerica up all the way into Canada. He’s frequently shown as a humpback. I’m going to show you a petroglyph that shows that as actually a basket on his back. And we do know that the Hohokam never showed a human person with a deformity. So, this is very unusual for the Hohokam.
One of the arguments when I first started looking at archaeology was whether or not the O’odham people were actually the descendants of the Hohokam. Back at that time, archaeologists wanted to have firm evidence. Something they could, you know, pick up a pot, a site where they could see homes, that sort of thing. More recently, archaeologists are starting to listen to the descendant tribes, and yeah, I had to laugh at that one, too. Take the oral history and frequently it matches completely with what the archaeologists know. Give you one quick example of that. The reason that Casa Grande was in such good shape when it was first found is that the Hohokam culture had gotten very top-heavy and the priests and leaders were keeping all the grain in the great house and giving it out in leaner years. Well, when years got really lean, they stopped giving it out. People got ticked off and so they were attacking the great houses. According to the Tohono O’odham creation story, somebody tipped off the priests that were living in the great house up at Casa Grande. They all left. So when the people came to attack it, they didn’t have to tear it down because people were already gone. And it matches completely with the fact that that is the one building that we still have standing.
This one I’ll give you a good example for, an anthropologist in 1908 was watching a Pima dance and he said the dancers were shown in a circle holding on each other’s shoulders, with their arms extended across the shoulder adjoining. The position did not permit much freedom, and movement was confined to stomping the feet and bending the body. Does that look like what you’re looking at? It sure does. And this was not an uncommon design. This pot I just love. I mean that is gorgeous. This is just from S’edav Va’aki. What used to be called Pueblo Grande up in Phoenix. The new term is S’edav Va’aki, but even they’ve, you know, really latched on to this. Another common human figure was the burden carrier. And again, you’ll notice both with the dancers and with these folks, everybody’s facing to the right. They’ve got a basket on their back. They’re holding that basket with what’s called a trump line. So, another piece of cloth or leather that they could hold over their head to kind of help balance the weight that they were carrying. And then a staff in the front. And we see photographs of this when people first came down and looked at how the Papago were carrying things, although in that case it was all the women carrying stuff on their backs. But when the Spanish first arrived, they described exactly what we’re seeing here. And there is a Tohono O’odham artist who has made sculpture that looks very much like this as well.
One of the unusual things about the Hohokam is their art was really very sophisticated. This is showing us what’s called a negative and a positive. This concept became used by European artists much ater. But what we’re talking about is you want to show a bird. So, you don’t paint the bird. You leave a negative and paint the outline. Or you paint the bird and he’s the positive and the rest of the bowl is the negative. This was never used for human figures. We don’t know why. We don’t know what the symbolism meant, but you never saw a human figure in a negative. But we certainly saw birds. Birds were one of the most common animal figures that you would see. I love this. This is a plate. It’s actually from the Tucson Basin of a snake with a bird. And people who know birds will tell you, they can tell you, you know, what kinds of birds a lot of these are. I love this one.
Almost never see fish in Hohokam pottery. Very unusual. We know that some Hohokam ate fish and some didn’t. I talked to an archaeologist last week who was like, “Yeah, we we’d go to a trash midden in one village and there’d be fishbones and you go to the trash midden in the next village and there’s no fishbones.” So again, nobody knows why, but that’s the way things kind of went. Another negative in the scoop censers. I mentioned again, this is one of those things where the western archaeologist is putting his word on something, but we do know that these were small bowls. Sometimes the bottoms were hollow and you could put in little stones or pieces of something that would make it rattle. There was evidence that they were burning like sage and or minerals on the top. These were frequently found at cremation sites. Human effigies of censers. These are again, pardon the bad English words, called clothes pin dolls. Well, obviously the Hohokam weren’t hanging their clothes out on lines. And these were not dolls. These are human figures usually made from clay from the bottom of riverbeds. But the reason they got that name is because you would take two rolls of clay, pinch them together at the top, you know, kind of squeeze in your face and sometimes arms. Sometimes they think twigs were put in for arms. Sometimes they were very small. You can see the one on the right has a little hole there. They think that might have been a stone for his heart.
I would be remiss, particularly talking to an archaeology society or a history society, if I didn’t tell you about Alice Hubbard Carpenter. She’s from Oracle. Do we have anybody from Oracle here today? They didn’t come down. Those dirty dogs, I’m going to be talking about them a lot, shingle them. So, she was born in the Midwest in 1898. Her husband died of influenza, so probably 1918. Her son died at age 11 from polio. She knew about Oracle because her father had gone there for his health. So, she moved to Oracle, but before she could even get into a house, the stock market crash occurred and her stockbroker sent her a letter with a nickel in it and said nothing more coming. So, she and her neighbors built herself a home, and she became quite the fixture in the Oracle community. She became fascinated with the Hohokam culture. She was not trained as an archaeologist, but there were no archaeologists working up in the area at the time. So, she would go out and find pieces. She would make very detailed notes about where she found stuff, what she had found. She would do sketches of it. We’ll see some sketches from a friend of hers that worked with her with it who was actually an artist. Later in her time she would take photographs. She was not a pot hunter. She was actually looking for knowledge about the people.
She made friends with the ranchers and so if there was a big rainstorm and it flooded out like a creek bed or whatever and pieces started showing up, the ranchers would keep their cattle away for a couple of days, let her know about it. She’d grab her friends, they’d go out, get whatever material they could. Even before it was law, the Arizona Highway Department had a policy. If you were out like raiding for a new road and you ran into some old stuff, you were supposed to stop, find an archaeologist, and give them a couple of days. Well, up in Oracle, there wasn’t an archaeologist, and so they would go get Alice, and she’d grab her friends, and they would go out and take stuff in.
She was meticulous in her documentation. So much so that her field notes are still used by archaeology students today to look at, you know, “Okay, I’m seeing a piece of pottery. Where did that come from? You know, what was going on there?” Her field journals, as I mentioned, are still being used. The Oracle Historical Society has at least one of her field journals. They let me play with it and look through it. That was really cool. They have some of her material. The Oracle Library has a room in back if you ask them to let you in that has some of her material. Most of it went to the Arizona State Museum and obviously they take very good care of it, but their collection is not digitalized. So, they can give you slides, but they can’t give you anything you can use for an art talk. But she found 73 different types of pottery, 9,000 pot sherds, 197 full pots, palettes, projectiles, points, axes, pretty much a lot of everything. An amazing woman.
So, more of those clothes pin dolls. This one is unusual because most of those were full length. This one was seated. That thing on his head we think was a kind of helmet that he participated in the ball games and what we call balls were either solid rock or a really thick like rubber material and they could cause serious damage. So, it’s not surprising that ball game players would have some sort of head protection.
This one again goes back to the idea of the western archaeologist superimposing their thoughts. This is called a Janus figure. Well, if you remember from, you know, your mythology or whatever, Janus is a Roman god of beginnings and endings, hence the term January, or they were also found in doorways. So, looking back and looking forward, we don’t know what this meant to the Hohokam. They probably didn’t know Roman mythology at the time, I’m guessing. But the pictures are done by Leslie Fuller. This was found in Oracle and that’s what Leslie Fuller did with it. There’s actually a book called The Feathered Prince. Pima County Library has it. They won’t give it out, but you can look at it down at the main library.
We see animal effigies. Palettes were pieces of stone. We used to think that this was unique to the Hohokam. They’ve since found these in South America and also up in the Sinagua region. So whether the Sinagua were making them or Hohokam were trading them, we’re not sure. Not the way you and I think of a palette. You think of an artist holding a palette and it’s got a bunch of little dots of paint on it. We think these were more ceremonial. You do see evidence of hematite in the one at the bottom. The one that’s blue, that’s a lead oxide, but we think that they would heat them from below which would release, in the case of the lead, a blue smoke. So they were used, we think, in ceremonies because most of these again were found at cremation sites.
Very briefly, I’m going to run through the perishables because I want to have time to talk about jewelry. So they didn’t just weave the cloth, they put patterns into their cloth. This is a backstrap loom, and I’ll show you somebody using one of those. These are obviously reproductions. These were from up at S’edav Va’aki. But they grew a lot of cotton. But they would put designs into their weaving or color the cloth or color the cloth and then make it into designs as they were weaving. Most of these were found up around Walnut Creek. They were felt to be trade goods from the Hohokam up to that area at the upper end of the Sinagua. So like around Flagstaff, that area, because obviously cotton isn’t going to last couple thousand years in the desert, they would make spindles. Some of them just as simple as a pottery fragment with a hole in it. Some of them very complicated stone carvings. And that would go onto a piece where you would then spin your wool. This is a Zuni woman up at the Grand Canyon showing the art of spinning. And her husband has a backstrap loom. So, these looms are horizontal. If you’re familiar with like Hopi or Navajo, you’re used to the vertical looms, but we do think that the Hohokam were using these horizontal looms. Probably not put on the back of a folding chair. Just a guess.
They used agave, yucca, sotol. They used the fibers. They used the tips to make like a needle. So if they had, say, rabbit skins they were trying to sew together, they could punch holes in that way. The sotol root system makes a very good soap. The agave, as you know, makes a very good food if you get the heart out before it flowers.
We have evidence of mats. This is from the floor of a pit house. So, we know that they were making mats. These next few slides are actually from the museum up in Globe and they’re considered Salado. But again, remember Salado and Hohokam were kind of mixing at the end. So, we’re guessing that the Hohokam probably had similar things as well, but we don’t know that for sure because there’s nothing from that time frame. They use stone. These are used to like to straighten your arrow shafts or your atlatls. This one I just love. They found a cave full of corn, and they found that little circular thing that you could use to shuck your corn, which I thought was kind of clever. Manos and metates. Lots of these found in the areas. Mortar and pestle.
I’m again not going to talk about these much other than to point out the flute player over here clearly has a basket. We don’t find any flutes in the Hohokam area. Again, you would expect them to have gone away over time, although we do have some bone whistles. So, we know they did have that idea of how to make bones into whistles. This site I wanted to put up because it’s Pictures Rock site in Marana. And after we finish talking in hopefully about 10 minutes, I’ve got a handout for you with a bunch of sites. So, if I piqued your interest, we’ll look at some of those sites. Picture Rocks is the one that actually has the sun dagger. So, on the solstice, you can go and see the sun come up and go right through the center of a spiral. It’s really cool.
We’re going to hit the jewelry now, the pretty stuff. So, turquoise was the stone of choice. These obviously are all mosaics made onto pieces of shell. Their trade routes were amazing. They got a lot of their turquoise from over here in Baker, California. Now, I don’t know why. We’ve got a ton of turquoise here in the Tucson Basin and further afield, but for some reason, they liked the turquoise from Baker. They went up to the Hopi Mesa to get coal. They went over to New Mexico for things like obsidian.
They traveled all the way down to the Sea of Cortez. All of their shells could be found in one bay called the Bay of Adair down in the Sea of Cortez. They did have shellfish in the rivers, but the shells were too soft to use for any kind of jewelry. They also got salt from that area. The hematite we’ve talked about, rough turquoise, but there were over 27 different minerals found at Snaketown alone. So they had access to a whole variety of different kinds of stone to use in their jewelry. Sometimes it would just be a piece of turquoise that had been smoothed down and put a hole in it to make a pendant. They also did a lot of shell beads and turquoise beads both. They would combine the shell, and we’ll look at that shell again in a minute, but add the turquoise mosaic to that, combine beads and pendants. The red is hematite. The white is probably shell or coral of some kind. Sometimes they would just put a hole in the shell and use that for a pendant.
The major types of shell that they used: the one on the upper left is Laevicardium, and I want to get my notes so I could get this correct. Spondylus, which is something you have to dive for. It’s down three or four feet in the bay, and so they would have to dive to get that. The Turritella and Olivella, and also Conus shells. We know that they were going down there. There are routes clear down to the Bay of Adair that have petroglyphs showing that they were Hohokam sites. They brought the shell back up and then worked on it here. And we know that because the middens are full of, you know, little bits of shell fragment. They weren’t obviously eating it, carrying it back three weeks shellfish in the desert. I don’t think so.
This is an etched and painted Laevicardium shell. And I’ll talk about etching. They use shell tinklers on their clothing. If you’ve ever been to like a Yaqui dance, they have bells on the bottom of their trousers and use that to make noise. So, assuming it’s kind of a similar thing, sometimes they would carve the shell or make larger carvings of shell combining both shell and the turquoise and beads. This one was one of Emil Haury’s books. So I put it in, but again it’s kind of a guess.
The big workhorse is the Glycymeris gigantea or giant bittersweet. This was the shell that they used the most. It came from Baja California. And what they would do is sand down the top of the shell until it got thin and then be able to punch it out and leave them with the outside shell. These are called bracelets. When we got back into the time when they were doing inhumations, they’re actually found on the upper arm of men. The hair ornaments were found on men. The hematite designs was found on the men. These were the peacocks. It wasn’t women wearing jewelry. But they would do again the mosaics. They would do carvings. This is just an exquisite snake eating its own tail carving, but sometimes just make a pendant out of that shell or etch the shell.
Etching occurred somewhere between like 1000 and 1150, mostly up around the Casa Grande area. It is suspected that there were just a few people who knew how to do this and they would pass it along and for some reason eventually it died out. But what does it take to etch a shell? Well, you start out with your shell. You cover it with a material called resist. So, this could be lac or tree sap or something like that. And you can see remnants of it still here. So, after you cover your shell, you carve out the design that you want. And then you put that into an acid bath and that eats through the shell. You take it back out of the acid bath, rinse it off, try to get rid of the resist, and you have this. But my question to you is, they didn’t have Home Depot to go down and get some acid. Where do you think the acid came from? This is speculation, but not just mine. So, if you think about the Tohono O’odham, one of the things they do is they gather the saguaro fruit, they make it into wine. What happens if you leave wine sitting out too long? It turns to vinegar. What is vinegar? It’s acetic acid. Vinegar. That’s fine. Fine acid. Yep. So probably that’s where they got it. We don’t know for sure. But they made these beautiful etchings. And I would point out to you that this was 500 years before people in Europe learned how to use acid etching. So, you know, we talk about these people as being primitive or backwards or, you know, whatever. They were pretty darn sophisticated for what they were doing.
But back to my last why and look at this. I am on time. I’m never on time. I get started on stories and I’m terrible. The quote is from Mary Russell Ferrell Colton. She was one of the founders of the Museum of Northern Arizona. She was a very strong proponent of Native American artists. But she said, “Art is generally regarded as a luxury. I regard it quite otherwise as a very intimate and human thing, impossible to dissociate from home and the lowly affairs of every day. The desire for beauty and art, they are one and the same.” So, they just couldn’t help themselves. They had to make things pretty. I asked a friend of mine who’s an archaeologist in the area for suggestions. He sent me 37 typewritten pages of suggestions. So, two of the best sites for reconstructed Hohokam are Pueblo Grande, which is now known as S’edav Va’aki, which is up just south of the Phoenix airport.
So, yeah, up in Phoenix, they have a reconstructed ball court. They have a reconstructed outdoor kitchen. They have a pit house. They have a compound area. And then they have unreconstructed platform mound. You can see some of the canals from there. They have a museum which is only partially open right now, but it has at least two rooms of exhibits. Very nice. Probably one of the best ways to get a really good handle on what a Hohokam site look like. The other one that I would recommend is the one in Globe. It’s Salado. But again, a lot of overlap with the Hohokam and they’ve got a large, reconstructed area. They have some gardens up there. The one at Phoenix also has early gardens with an idea of how the irrigation system would have worked.
Park Before Waters is a site where four major canals came out of the Salt River. You can actually walk through one of the canals that’s been dug out. It’s okay. I would not make a trip to Phoenix to see it, but if you’re up there to see S’edav Va’aki, you might want to swing over to Park Before Waters. The Hohokam Heritage Center on the Gila River Indian Reservation is amazing. We had a docent-guided tour. Two levels, lots of baskets, lots of potteries, a great video. Just a really excellent informative museum.
Casa Grande, as I mentioned, up in Coolidge, it’s relatively close. It’s hour, hour and a half drive. Once that gets fully reopened, they have ranger-led walks. They have I think they have a video. They have one of the best book collections in their shop. I went up to the guy and said, “Can I just take like one of everything?” It’s like, “Yeah, sure. What’s the limit on your card?” And speaking of that, they’re part of the Western Parks National Stores. So, if you’re a member of Western Parks, use that and get your 10% discount.
I mentioned the Oracle Historical Society and the Oracle Library. Both of those have nice collections. I actually got a book that they sold me at the library about Alice Hubbard Carpenter. The Oracle Society Museum is supposed to be open on Thursdays and Saturdays. I would strongly suggest you call. If you get up there and it says it’s supposed to be open and it’s not, you just call the number, and the guy comes from his home and comes over and opens up for you. The library is also run by volunteers. If a volunteer doesn’t show up, the library isn’t open. So, it’s worth, you know, checking out, but there’s also a couple of new good restaurants up in Oracle. So, worth a day trip. Catalina State Park has the Romero Ruins interpretive trail. They also second and fourth Mondays have a docent who leads a trail walk to look at Hohokam sites. So, check their website, but that I she’s also a docent at Tohono Chul. That’s why I know her. Really good source of information there.
Yuma Wash is in Marana. It’s right behind the library in Marana and that site is open. The Redemptionist Renewal Center is the one on Picture Rocks Road that I mentioned that’s open to the public. You can go down there anytime, look at their petroglyphs. If you get a chance to go on the solstice, it is incredible. Los Morteros again over in Marana. The park is open. You just walk in. There’s a ball court that you can see. There’s a trash midden. There’s a lot of fairly decent signage. This is also where Father Kino came through. There’s also a spot where the Butterfield stage used to have a station. There’s not a whole lot to see on the ground, but they do a nice job with interpreting it. Fort Lowell Park. If you go far to the east side, there’s a Hohokam site back there. You kind of have to know what you’re looking for, but that’s always open.
And then inside Saguaro National Park, there is a hill with over 200 petroglyphs. I could not see that because when I went up, it was in the middle of the park being closed and I was being respectful. So, I haven’t seen that. But there are, as was mentioned, Honeybee Canyon. Yes, ma’am.
Audience member: Do you know the name of the trail that leads to 200 petroglyphs?
Mary Jo: I apologize. I came I just came across it and okay knew I couldn’t get up there, so I didn’t write it down. My apologies.
Other thoughts or questions? There’s a site right off of Moore Road, but it’s one of the typical archaeology sites. After they excavated it, they fully covered it over. So, you will see signs that say this is where the ball court was or this is where this or that was. But there’s really not much to see. I’ve not been down to Honeybee Canyon, but I understand there are petroglyphs down there.
Audience member: There’s very little petroglyphs at Honeybee Canyon. There’s like one I think they covered a lot of them.
Mary Jo: There are a bunch of petroglyphs on BLM land that’s across the expressway from Picacho Peak, but I would suggest you have to really, you know, dig through the web to find the directions to it. I went up there twice since then. I could not find it again and I can’t find my original directions, so I didn’t put it on your list. But if you can talk to somebody up that way that knows you literally just walk up to it and you can walk around a hill that’s just covered with petroglyphs. At Gila Bend there’s also a large petroglyph collection and it’s right off the expressway. You just get off the expressway at Gila Bend; turn right and then there’s a a left into this little park area and again just a whole mound that you can walk around and see petroglyphs. Questions, comments, discussion. Yes, ma’am.
Audience member: Were the Hohokam involved in the big agave community fields and pits?
Mary Jo: That was Hohokam and that was also Trincheras. The question is the big agave pits. If you go up to Tumamoc Hill along there you’ll see terrace farming which is generally considered Trincheras. But there were a lot of fields in Marana as well that were agave fields and they did do the, you know, digging an underground pit and roasting the if you get the agave heart right before the spike comes up, it’s very rich in sugars. And there are a number of Native American communities that still do the roasts today. They do them down at Mission Garden. Went to one of them. Went to one of those. Oh, that’s great. Yeah, those are fun. There’s also a Tohono O’odham garden now down at Mission Gardens. So, you can see how they did their kitchens and used like the Ocotillo to surround it so that the critters couldn’t get in, that sort of thing. Yes, ma’am.
Audience member: Are you going to be doing this presentation again?
Mary Jo: I am scheduled to do it in December at I think it’s called Hacienda on the River. You could contact them and see if it would be okay if if you know somebody that you want to refer down there. That’s the only I just within the last two weeks put this back on the Tucson Museum of Art schedule. So, it is available through TMA if you want to schedule it for an organization or whatever. Devon and I had a reciprocal arrangement. She helped me out with a project at Tohono Chul, and I offered to do this. So, normally it would go through TMA. Okay. Yes, ma’am.
Audience member: Will the video be available for us to see?
Devon Sloan: Yes, ma’am. It will on our website. We will need to get it edited. It’ll be on the website, and we’ll put it on YouTube. ovhistory.org.
Audience member: How do you know it was an egalitarian society?
Mary Jo: That is a very good question. I don’t know that we know that.
Audience member: You said it at the beginning.
Mary Jo: Yeah. And that’s the way I have been taught. I guess it was lack of evidence. There was no evidence of any kind of structural bigwig. So, there weren’t houses there. It wasn’t like you went into a community and there was one house that was a lot bigger than everybody else’s or one house that had more ornamentation or more pottery or more food or whatever. So, it it’s more of the lack of evidence of a hierarchy rather than a knowledge that it was egalitarian. But we do know that over the years towards the end that it did become very hierarchical. And we saw that both even in the platform mounds. Some of the homes that were on top of the platform mounds were much larger, more elaborate than the homes of the people that were living ground level of the rest of the community. So, we started to see a change even then and certainly by the time of the great houses. Those were clearly being lived in by a separate group of people. Again, lack of evidence doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there. Just means we haven’t found it yet. But it’s like with the you know I mentioned that archaeologists were very hesitant to call the O’odham nation descendant tribes because they saw no evidence on the surface. There’s an archaeologist who’s a Gila Indian community member who is doing archaeology on that protohistoric period and he says that there is evidence of people living there at the time that the western or the I keep saying western meaning Anglo-American archaeologist weren’t looking in the right place. They were looking too deep, and the evidence is still right on the surface. There’s actually a group of Gila Indian River women who are trying to reconstruct the pottery from that era and there is a site if you go to YouTube the Amerind Foundation, they just had a speaker within the past month talking about those things. So, kind of interesting up-to-date knowledge. Other questions. Thank you all so much. You really made it enjoyable.
Devon Sloan: We made it enjoyable for you because you made it enjoyable for us. What an education, right? Hey, thank you again everybody for coming. Just a couple things about the historical society. Saturday’s Pusch House Museum at Steam Pump Ranch. We’re there 9:00 to noon. This is time we talking about how the society began. This coming week we’re going to talk about holidays and the cultural traditions we have in our area. Donations are accepted.