The Home of the Hohokam

First stop of our second day in Phoenix was the Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park. I hadn't bought advance tickets, because they were not required, and I thought we might appreciate the ability to show up a little later in the morning. Online reviews also suggested we would only need 1-1.5 hours, and the baseball game would start at 1pm. Well, as you probably know by now, Spring Training was cancelled, and we were in the process of buying a house, so we ended up using the morning for a research Zoom (me) and setting up the utilities (Dear Husband). Then we took the hostess's bicycles for a short ride on the nearby "Old Crosscut Canal Path" before I cooked us a nice lunch that we enjoyed at a high-top table on the patio at our AirBnB. If DH looks cold, that's because the nighttime temperatures were in the 40s, so another perk of being able to flip our schedule was getting to walk the park in full sun, much as we had with Taliesin West the day before.

We started with the small but reasonably thorough museum, which explained how the Hohokam [Anglicized name] had settled along the Salt and Gila Rivers about 200-1450 CE. They dug--by hand! (no draft animals)--miles upon miles of canals to irrigate the land on which they grew food crops like maize, squash, and beans, and also cotton. Knowing how much water cotton requires gives you sense of how much the land has changed, now that the rivers have been dammed and no longer flow throughout the year, much less flood the alluvial plain where Phoenix / Scottsdale / Tempe / Mesa now sit. At first they lived in individual "pithouses," dug partially into the ground and covered with adobe. They chipped petroglyphs into boulders and made distinctive "red on tan" pottery. The Hohokum also spun the cotton into thread that they wove on back-braced looms and traded with other tribes for seashells that they turned into jewelry and traded again. Later, perhaps after depleting the local wood supply, they moved to pueblo-style "apartment buildings" and built mounds like the one here, presumably for administrative and ceremonial purposes. Researchers have discovered that they were situated to tell calendar time via the solstices. The Hohokam also apparently played ball games on a court somewhat like the Maya. They abandoned the area in the mid-1400s, too soon to be decimated by European diseases or conquest; instead, the cause is thought to be divided leadership and mismanagement of the water supply during and after a drought. The modern Pima and Tohono O'odham ("Desert People") are their descendants.

You can see what's left of the mound and some reconstructed homes here.