Museum of Ideas

One day in the late '30s a well-dressed, elder-ly gentleman appeared at the office of Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Ari-zona. He asked Odd S. Halseth, city arche-ologist, to show him a few things of inter-est. Halseth eyed the man for a moment, then without speaking picked up a piece of stone from his desk and handed it to the visitor. "That's a stone hoe," he explained. "It was one of the main tools used by the Hohokam Indians in building what we would consider a $1,000,000 irrigation system in this valley many centuries ago." The man had apparently expected to be shown some-thing more spectacular, but soon forgot his disappointment in the next three hours as Halseth told him the strange, dramatic story of the Hohokams, the New World's first true irrigation farmers. That was how Henry Morgenthau Sr. was introduced to the amazing saga of a prehistoric people that appeared in two river valleys of Arizona sometime before 700 A.D., built a 127-mile system of dams and canals that brought them comparative plenty, and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. The Hohokams, whose name means "those who have vanished," passed out of history as if sucked up by the scorching desert heat, leaving only meager clues to one of the archeological enigmas of our times.

The Morgenthau incident, lifted from the many that have enlivened the museum's 23 years of existence, clearly portrays the theme around which this most unique of institutions is built. It is a museum of ideas, carefully woven together to tell the story of a by-gone age as nearly as man can reconstruct it.

The ideas, of course, cannot be placed on exhibit in the meager showcases the museum affords. But the Hohokam implements, tools and artifacts that express these ideas can be and are. They have been carefully sifted from the adobe dirt of the Indian ruin that surrounds the museum.

The Pueblo Grande site and its buildings are owned and financed by the city of Phoenix. It is believed to be theand interpreting Indian articles taken from the Pueblo Grande ruin support that fact.

He has helped build man's knowledge of the Hohokam, and if you might be fortunate enough to sit in his office and ask him to tell you the story behind any one of the artifacts, say the stone hoe, you could lean back in your chair and see the tale unfolding as if flashed on a giant screen before youThe time is only a few centuries after the birth of a great teacher in Nazareth. The place is Arizona's sundrenched Salt River Valley.

Dark skinned men, naked but for a breech cloth, swarm over the banks of the river. Some scrape at the botThe only municipal monument of its type in the nation.

But despite this enlightened governmental assistance, the real credit for founding and directing development of both the ruin and the museum goes to Halseth. He has been in charge since the project was started in 1929. It is his life's work, and while he admits that what he has to show isn't necessarily spectacular, most visitors go away feeling the story behind the exhibits is more than spectacular. There is something of the Greek tragedy, Wagnerian opera and classic epic interwoven in its fabric.

Halseth, a wiry young-looking man of 59, knows every twist and turn of the drama by heart. The lines etched in his face by many years of excavating, cataloguing, studying Atom of a ditch they are slowly deepening with their stone blades. Others haul dirt out of the trough in baskets or skins, dumping it along the sides to raise the channel's carrying capacity.

Slowly, tediously, meticulously, the canal forms, leading only in the direction gravity will allow the water to flow.

Then another group of men begin filling the river bed with rocks and brush. The barrier they throw up, made almost impervious by the mat of arrowweed used between the stones, backs up the river and raises it until the water pours into the canal and onto the lands where the Hohokam has planted his corn. Thus life is assured for the expanding population of the tribe. More acres can be made to produce.

This glimpse is but one of many that Halseth could give you, beginning with the very earliest signs of the Hohokam along Arizona's Gila River about 300 or 400 A.D. and several centuries later in the nearby Salt River area.

At first they cultivated the flood plains along the river banks, depending on the seasonal rise of the water to overflow onto their crops. Then, as the need for food increased with their numbers, they began digging their canals to bring the water to the higher plains surrounding the stream.

There are many physical objects at Pueblo Grande that illustrate this process and also provide a medium for bringing out the daily routine of the tribe. You might select a fired-clay canteen, complete with holding loops for a strap to throw over a shoulder; you might pick up one of the rare but infinitely beautiful specimens of cotton woven fabric that were worn on ceremonial occasions, or you could choose a grinding stone, a carved stone effigy, or one of many types of pottery.

The industrious tribesmen carried the canteens when they went to work in their fields. They carefully nurtured the plants, cultivated around them with sticks and always had a drink at their side that was cool in spite of the heat because of the porous nature of the container.

The cotton fabric was woven from the Indian's small but useful plantings. This same Indian fiber was later used to develop the long-staple cotton that now grows prolifically under the hand of the white man in the same area.

The grinding stones had many uses, including the reduction of corn to meal, but much more remarkable were the stone effigies. They show the independent and highly advanced stage of Hohokam art, and some portray remarkable three-dimensional perspective.

Archeologists have found the pottery fairly complex and an object lesson in the Hohokam's rudimentary, but surprising knowledge of metallurgy. Analysis has shown that silica was added to the clay mixture used for cooking pots. This kept them from cracking when subjected to heat. Sand or other ground-up material was frequently added for temper, and some or all of these materials were withheld if a different effect were desired in household utensils. The Hohokams even learned to use different types of firing-an oxidizing flame if they wanted a red pot, or a reducing flame if they wanted it black. The sides of pottery used other than for cooking were gaily decorated in colors obtained from mineral and vegetable materials.

Halseth likes to tell all of these stories and many others about such things as the common Hohokam wearing apparel fashioned from the inner bark of cottonwood trees, their bows, arrows and spears used mainly in hunting, and their blankets that were woven from many materials, including dog hair, rabbit fur and cotton.

But most of all you seem to sense he likes the tale of how these prehistoric people learned to trade with the Pueblo Indians that inhabited the high plateau country in what is now northern Arizona and New Mexico, and with the more remote Indians along the Pacific coast.

The picture forms easily under the suggestion of his words-A small band of Indians move away from their village of clay-plastered huts in the darkness of early morning. They strike out to the north in single file, heavily laden with bundles of seed. Slowly they wend their way over a faint trail across the flat, brush and cactus-covered valley that will soon be flooded by the searing heat of a desert sun.

Hour after hour they plod ahead, stopping infrequently for rests, until finally the country breaks up into low hills and the dark green of pine forests shows on the towering mountains in the distance.

Up into the canyons they move, by rushing streams that plunge fiercely down the slope, by towering cliffs and grassy park areas until they reach the pass. Then up and over to the next range until finally they break out upon a high, flat plateau. There, many miles away, can be seen the faint outlines of great multi-storied houses-the home of their powerful neighbors to the north, commonly called Pueblo Indians, although divided into tribes known today as Hopi and Zuñi.

Encamped on the plain surrounding the apartment-like dwellings-some of which were probably the fabled "Seven Cities of Cibola" of which Fray Marcos de Niza, an early Spanish explorer, wrote-they would spread their wares and the bargaining would begin.

The Hohokam apparently traded their crops for the decorated Pueblo pottery and other products they felt could be useful. Evidence of this trade is found in remnants of identifiable pottery recovered from Hohokam ruins.

Even more surprising were the expeditions these prehistoric people made to the Pacific coast, traversing on foot a distance of some 400 miles that included the sandy desert west of Yuma, Ariz.

"They probably traveled along the Gila River, crossed the desert in the vicinity of the Salton Sea, entered the coastal mountains near the present site of Banning, Calif., and reached the ocean near what is now Los Angeles," Halseth relates.

"It was not known they made such expeditions until we discovered shell ornaments and other cultural objects in the ruin here that could have come only from the Pacific region," the museum director explains. "These began appearing among relics dated about 1100 A.D. and when we discovered them we made a cross check to see if there were any signs of Hohokam culture among artifacts of the California Indians of that date."

As expected, they were found, indicating that a small but healthy trade was carried on, probably based on exchange of Hohokam food products for shells and other ornamental materials.

The tales that can be woven around the many objects at Pueblo Grande are almost without limit. But the final story of what happened to these Indians is still too big for this or any other museum.

All Halseth can do to help give you the facts of this mystery is take you outside to the crumbling remains of what was once a Hohokam storehouse.

There he will point out the floor of a bin for corn, and then show how it was later filled in and another floor built on top. This process was repeated many times from about 1200 to 1400 A.D. throughout the Hohokam area. During the same period walls of the storehouse seem to have been thickened as if for defense purposes, and a tall central tower was added, such as that still partially preserved at the Casa Grande ruin some 40 miles southeast of Phoenix.

These signs have led Halseth to advance a theory that differs sharply from the popular belief that drought forced the Indians to find a new home. The thickened walls and the towers indicate a hostile tribe probably had begun raiding the Hohokam villages. But this in itself was not too at any time, and probably would not be enough to cause the Indians to leave. The real trouble, in Halseth's opinion, was water-logging of the land. The successive raising of the storehouse floors seems to indicate the Hohokams were trying to keep their grain away from the rising water.

The water-logging theory, which at first sounded strange in a land as naturally arid as Arizona, is now being accepted by more and more archeologists. The condition was brought about by taking thousands of acre feet of water that would normally have run off down river beds, and spreading it onto the Hohokam farm lands. A good portion of the water seeped through the soil to raise the already high water table until it reached the surface.

Where the Hohokams went when they decided to leave en masse, and what happened to them later no one knows. Some claim the prosperous and friendly Pima Indians that were found along the Gila when the Spaniards first explored Arizona in the 16th century were their descendants. But there isn't any solid fact upon which to base this assumption.

One faint and meager clue has been uncovered. Hopi Indians in northern Arizona told early white settlers their ancestors once lived in the hot valleys to the south, but were forced out by flood. These individuals spoke of it as being a special type of flood, one that came up from the ground.

This could mean that some of the Hohokams may have moved to the Pueblo country to be assimilated by the Hopi and lost as an ethnic group, but that is only conjecture.