The Hidden Hohokam

HOHOKAM PAST HIDDEN BY THE RISE OF A MODERN PHOENIX by CRAIG CHILDS

Some built regally atop high, handmade earthen mounds with walled, interior courtyards.

I was born here, in Tempe actually, and have long wondered what lies beneath. I figured a bicycle was the best way to move through the city, feeling every shift in the landscape even as transit buses belched exhaust around me. I took a few notes, folded the map and swerved back into traffic.

The next stop was near Arizona State University where apartments were under construction atop a Hohokam burial site. I locked my bike in front of a bar and walked over to the construction site where I met Tom Wright, an archaeologist who had dug there before the bulldozers. Wright wore jeans, a T-shirt and a John Deere baseball cap. We stood in the scarce shade of a palm tree, and he pointed around, telling me of an excavation he had performed. Before con-struction crews arrived, he had worked with a team digging at the surface of an abandoned lot. First he found the remains of home-less camps dating back 20 years or so. Below that were the bits and pieces of a Hispanic barrio, and below that a Hohokam jar, bulldozers. Wright wore jeans, a T-shirt and a John Deere baseball cap. We stood in the scarce shade of a palm tree, and he pointed around, telling me of an excavation he had performed. Before construction crews arrived, he had worked with a team digging at the surface of an abandoned lot. First he found the remains of homeless camps dating back 20 years or so. Below that were the bits and pieces of a Hispanic barrio, and below that a Hohokam jar,

HOHOKAM CANALS USED TO RUN ALONG THERE, EXACTLY WHERE THE MODERN CANALS NOW LIE. THIS HAS LONG BEEN AN IMPORTANT PLACE.

squat like a mushroom, likely filled with a human cremation. “We have an arrangement with the Pima Tribe,” Wright said. “No photographs, only sketches. No brushing the dirt off to see if there are paintings. No removal of its contents. We will catalog it, study it for a bit, then give it to the Pima who will rebury it themselves.” The Pimas trace their ancestry to the Hohokam, so they often handle the repatriation of Hohokam burial artifacts.

The pot was found at the last moment of the dig, as Wright was running out of funding for the excavation and as construction crews geared up to build the apartments. Working 10 hours a day in 110-degree weather, his crew had come across the remnants of an ancient community. He pointed to the boundaries he imagined of this com-munity, under an asphalt street and a set of abandoned rail tracks, and under a three-story apartment building shaded by eucalyptus trees. From where we stood, he pointed all around to locations of platform mounds, one under a trailer park, and another beneath a fraternity house. Everywhere beneath us were the leavings of the Hohokam.cut across parking lots, through alleys, up and down neighborhood streets, the map flagging under my arm. I had com-piled this map based on conversations with others interested in archaeology, and days of sorting through archived maps of the city dating to the late 1800s. On it was an overview of Hohokam sites that had once been visible, and arteries of abandoned canals, plus a grid of modern city streets so that I could find my way. I drifted around a garbage truck and stopped when I was out of its path, opening the map again to see where I was.

The map told me that a block to my right, in a residential neigh-borhood, there had once been a large compound of Hohokam buildings surrounded by a low adobe wall. To the other side was a platform mound now called Mesa Grande, and I biked over to it through traffic, passing the city's oddities of automatic car washes and convenience stores.

I maneuvered the bike around a hospital where a fire engine pulled out and turned down the street, then between trash Dumpsters to a fenced-off area of several acres. Within the fence stood a high mound of land streaked with bike tracks where kids for the last few decades had been stunt-riding. The only identifying features of the mound were trenches dug at ongoing excavations. Beneath these scant diggings lies one of the three largest Hohokam sites of its time. It was pleasing to see the marks of children atop this mound, a sign that life goes on in this city, the same as it might have been 700 years ago.

From there I followed a large irrigation canal, its olive waters graced by mammoth fish. Opening the map, I found myself next to, if not on top of, a Hohokam ballcourt - a rounded, flat-floored feature similar in many ways to the ballcourts of the Mayans. I glanced from the map into the canal, watching the fish sweep like zeppelins among the wreckage of urban refuse: the skeleton of a bicycle, innumerable traffic cones, chairs, a desk, a trash can. These modern artifacts were half-consumed by the greenish clay of canal dust and algae. Archaeology, I thought, is a constant process.

The canal led me onward to an enormous city cemetery perched on a terrace overlooking northern Phoenix and barren desert moun-tains farther off. The cemetery had not been built here out of happenstance. It was placed at the edge of one of the few expansive views in the Phoenix Basin, likely where Mormons originally buried their dead, and where settling Hispanics dug graves even earlier. I checked the map and indeed, found numerous large Hohokam buildings lined up for the view. Hohokam canals used to run along there, exactly where the modern canals now lie. This has long been an important place.

I kept with the modern canal, leaving the cemetery, riding farther to the east. I came to a man fishing, and when I stopped, he explained how the largest bass were often caught in the wreckage of shopping carts. He laughed, “This? This is urban fishing. I go to get a license and they just laugh at me. People come get their dinners out of here. Pimas, I see them, old men out fishing, got their lawn chairs, fish-ing all day for supper.” As I left him, I wondered if it had been the same for the Hohokam, if people have always come to the urban canals to catch fish. At a particular Hohokam site excavated in Phoenix, fish accounted for over a quarter of all animal bones excavated. Waterfowl, mud turtles and muskrats also appeared in the archaeological record. No doubt, the canals offered more than just water for corn and cotton.

A Salt River Project truck came by looking important, as embla-zoned and siren-bound as a police vehicle. It stopped at the mechanical compound of a giant headgate, and a man got out. I biked up to

To him, dismounted and asked if he were managing this headgate. He regarded me from a distance, but eventually warmed up to me in conversation. He introduced himself as Jim Elliot, an 18year employee with SRP. Explaining that he was in charge of the west-flowing canal here, he told me that it runs 30 miles through Tempe and Phoenix, finally delivering its last drops onto farmland on the Maricopa Reservation. He had worked on some of the early canal digs for SRP in the company of men who had worked on even earlier ditches using horse-drawn plows. When I asked him about Hohokam material he told me that they were digging their city canals right inside theHohokam canals. About 4 feet down, they kept running into bits and pieces of artifacts.

"One guy found a pot, perfect condition," he said. "And there was this ball of clay, bright red thing." He formed a ball with his hands to show me. "Somebody had it for making a pot, I figure. Just bright, bright red, and still wet down in the ground. You could see where somebody had held it, finger imprints, like somebody had it in their hands yesterday."

They did, I thought. Just yesterday.

That night I checked into a motel and pulled my bike inside. The first thing I saw was a garish Southwestern print hung on the wall over the bed. It was cheap, with pink and lusterless turquoise, a generic landscape with distant buttes. It featured a foreground assemblage of pots: a painted, two-necked pot vaguely but not quite styled after modern Hopi work from northern Arizona, a reddish buff pot typical of rural Mexico in the early 1900s and a painted Zuni pot typical in certain places in New Mexico. The cultural affiliations seemed somewhat ludicrous for this motel room. Even the "cactus" in the painting was actually a cactuslike spurge from Africa, not something that would grow in the Southwest.

I stood for a few minutes studying the painting, fearing for our knowledge of landscape and heritage. But it was only cheap art, probably chosen by unknowing motel operators and representing, if anything, the diversity of cultures that has converged on this place. I remembered that among the traditional styles of Hohokam pottery found in the Phoenix area, there also appeared ceramics from far away. At a single excavated site, 272 pottery specimens showed up that were not from the area; the majority of them were ancient Puebloan (a contemporary but different culture) in origin from no closer than the northern part of Arizona, and some from far to the south in present-day Chihuahua, Mexico. People have long been traveling through this region, setting up shop here, introducing new styles, buying motels.

In the morning I left the motel and biked again through the city. I made numerous stops through the day: interviewing a developer who was building a subdivision atop a large Hohokam site; spending a couple hours with the city archaeologist who has been cataloging rock art sites throughout the city; and sitting beneath a freeway overpass to sketch a large piece of roadside artwork designed to look like a figure on a painted bowl 900 years old.Just before sunset, I locked my bike below one of the many mountains standing out of the city. I followed a trail going up and within the first minute found scratches of Hohokam designs barely lingering on a rock outcrop: a few deeply etched circles and an interlocking pattern of coils, a few animal figures. I climbed to a higher outcropping measled with small carved circles, similarly of Hohokam origin. Much of the rock art had been long ago obliterated by Saturdaynight partygoers, but enough remained that I could see the original designs. I climbed still higher, finding 700-year-old pieces of broken pottery spilled down the slopes.

One thing about the flatness of Phoenix: on even the smallest soapbox of a hill, the entire city becomes visible. As I climbed to the summit and sat there, I could see it all. Much like the Hohokam settlements that predate it, Phoenix has no particular center, nobody governing the vectors of growth, allowing it to spread without end.

Night came and I watched the city erupt into lights. From my vantage, Phoenix was a dazzling narrative, its network of lights relaying stories as far north, west and south as I could see. Office towers, baseball diamonds, shopping malls and the artistic loop and flow of neighborhoods radiated brilliantly from one cul-de-sac to the next. The air carried a steady drone as if the city were a machine.

What happened to the people who lived here before? Stories from modern Hopi in northern Arizona and O'odham people from central and southern parts of the state tell of warfare and seasons of drought followed by unendurable floods that destroyed the irrigation canals. Archaeologists have found matching data in the ground: Hohokam canals no longer used, headgates and pueblos abandoned, tools left in the fields.

The name "Hohokam" is a Pima Indian word meaning "entirely used up," the first syllable repeated to emphasize its thoroughness. The next civilization to come after them named itself "Phoenix," an image borrowed from Arabic mythology, a giant desert bird that lives for centuries, then at old age, burns itself on a funeral pyre, rising from the smoke and ashes, again young and vivid, ready to live until time again to burn.

I thought of this bird, its giant, colorful wings spreading across the desert. What will this city be called if it someday consumes itself in its own flames? Maybe the Pima Indians who today still live at the outskirts of the city will again call it Hohokam, the name for a people of much fanfare who come and go swiftly. AlCraig Childs usually avoids cities in his travels, but made an exception for this story. He has written eight books about the natural history of the Southwest, including The Desert Cries, published by Arizona Highways Books. He lives in western Colorado.

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