Indian Basketry in Arizona

The art of basketry in the American Southwest is one of the oldest crafts known on the continent. By 500 A.D. the people known to archaeologists as the Anasazi were making fine coiled basketry with elaborate designs. Archaeological care and thoroughness have preserved an excellent record of this art form representing nearly 1500 years of prehistoric evidence of man's universal urge to beautify the things he makes, an esthetic drive that continues its uninterrupted course into con-temporary time. Today the Hopi Indians of northern Arizona, descendants of the Anasazi, continue this basketry tradition in the form of beautiful coiled plaques of yucca fiber and a wicker-weave type made of wild currant and rabbit brush.

For those interested in acculturation studies this is an im-portant fact to note, as the Hopi are notoriously one of the Indian tribes most resistant to change in their traditional way of life. This is reflected in their religious ceremonies and craft-work, particularly in basketry which they continue to make in some quantity, and in general they have maintained the high quality of this ancient handicraft. This is in sharp contrast to other western American Indian tribes which once produced fine basketry but today manufacture only inferior copies of the old styles or none at all.

The archaeological record for southern Arizona is not as complete as that of the Anasazi time-space sequence, but a vast amount of information is available on the Hohokam. These prehistoric inhabitants of the Salt and Gila river valleys have left abundant records of a remarkable adaptation to desert life that embraced a time span of over a thousand years. The Pima Indians of historic time referred to the abandoned ruins of Casa Grande as handiwork of those "dead" or "disappeared," the Hohokam (accent the last syllable, Ho-HoKAM). The term Hohokam has been applied by American archaeologists to designate these prehistoric Arizonans who first settled along the valleys of the Gila, Salt, and Santa Cruz rivers around the beginnings of the Christian era.

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