Essay Database

Prehistory: Hohokam The Hohokam, the desert farmers of the American Southwest, were centered in the middle Gila and Salt river drainage basins in the semiarid Sonoran Desert of Arizona. This landscape had some mountain ranges separated by level basins or plains. The mountains were important as a source of natural water in springs and rock tanks and as a collector of rain as runoff for floodwater farming. High temperatures, low humidity, and little rain characterize …

…no major change in utilitarian stone tools from Sedentary to classic. More shell artifacts, especially as mosaic pieces, are produced in the Classic than ever before. The end of the Classic, between 1400 and 1450, is also the end of the Hohokam as an archeologically describable culture in southern Arizona. There is then a gap in the archeological records from the mid-fifteen century to the arrival of the Spanish. The Hohokam at that time were already declined.