4/4/2023 0 Comments Hohokam civilizationTheir trade and kin networks spread over at least 50,000 square miles of desert and perhaps into California and Baja California, forming a cohesive cultural unit that crossed ethnic and linguistic boundaries, according to Shackley's research. ![]() They traveled hundreds of miles by foot for trade in obsidian and marine shells. The most impressive of these was the walled, multistory adobe structure at Casa Grande, the remnants of which still beckon visitors at this site between Phoenix and Tucson. They built villages of thousands of people, with platform mounds and great-houses at the center where the elites lived. They transmuted thousands of square miles of hot, dry desert into farmland with water carried through hundreds of miles of canals. Shackley said that by their classic period (1150-1350 AD), the Hohokam comprised the most advanced culture in the Southwest. "Contrary to common belief, the archaeological and linguistic evidence indicates that the Hohokam were a diverse multiethnic and multilingual society that is mirrored in the current Native American composition of all of south, central and western Arizona," said Shackley. It gives many contemporary Native American Southwest groups a claim to Hohokam ancestry, now claimed by Arizona's Pima and Tohono O'Odham peoples. ![]() This theory of Hohokam culture, which Shackley will present this spring at the Society for American Archaeology meeting in New Orleans, thoroughly mixes up the story of Native American roots. Moreover, related groups may even have moved into Southern California carrying aspects of the distinctive Hohokam culture into the Imperial Valley and the San Diego area. Shackley's research on obsidian sources and projectile points confirms that Hohokam peoples managed a large, integrated economic area that covered most of Arizona, from the Colorado River to New Mexico and from Flagstaff to the Mexican border. ![]() Now, the spotlight is on the Hohokam, with results that reveal a very large, multiethnic network that may have spread all the way to the Southern California coast, according to the work of research archaeologist Steven Shackley at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The Hohokam, who inhabited the dry Sonoran desert of southern Arizona, were more or less ignored, even though they had by far the most advanced canal irrigation system in the New World.
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