Miraculously preserved miniature red-on-buff vessels and plain ware bowls

La Ciudad Unearthing the First Phoenix Beneath a Modern City an Ancient Culture Surrenders its Timeless Secrets

Story by Natalie Waugh Photography by Jeff Kida From about A.D. 300 to A.D. 1400 a people occupied the lower Sonoran desert of south-central Arizona, primarily along the Salt and Gila rivers. They built canals and diverted water from the rivers to irrigate their fields. They congregated in villages, worked together with a high degree of cooperation, and organized their activities to make use of the most valuable resource in their desert environment: water. They flourished over time, developing an increasingly complex society, with leaders and elites. Then, about A.D. 1400,they seem to have disappeared. They are called the Hohokam (those who have perished) by their descendents, the Pima Indians. All we know of the Hohokam comes from the physical remains of their lives: pottery, tools, jewelry, art, houses, trash, canals, cemeteries, ceremonial structures. These repose, for the most part, underground, covered by centuries of soil. They wait to be discovered, and to be understood, by the sleuths of time...by the archeologists.

From backhoes to dental picks, the tools of the archeologist at La Ciudad vary with the objective. (LEFT) As a backhoe digs a new test trench, a field worker makes precision measurements of clay samples for dating. (ABOVE) A carefully wielded dissecting needle reveals a shattered pot on the floor of a Hohokam house.

When the first European settlers came to the place where modern Phoenix now stands, they found the intriguing remains of a vanished people. Along the valley floor loomed large mounds, the size of small hills, that contained mainly trash. Here and there also were smaller "platform" mounds with the ruins of houses on top. And along both sides of the Salt River ran a series of canals dug back for miles into the desert.

The early white settlers cleaned out and used some of the canals, leveling the mounds and clearing the land for their own fields. Over time, streets and houses appeared: the city of Phoenix rose out of the desert, out of the ruins of an earlier civilization.

Like those early people, we have learned to survive in the desert. Temperatures exceed 100 degrees in Phoenix on most days from June through August. In nature only the hardiest of plants and the most resourceful of animals survive. Our lifeline, like that of the Hohokam before us, is water.

Today the bed of the Salt River through Phoenix is dry much of the time because upstream dams store the water. Only during wet seasons does water flow in the lower Salt. Before the upstream impoundment began in 1911, the Salt River flowed year-round. Mesquite, cottonwood, and willow trees grew along the river. Grasses grew back from the bank in the wide flood-plain. Birds and other animals thrived in the rich riverside habitat, and fish swam and spawned in the river.

When the Hohokam began to use this valley, they would have found water in abundance, trees for firewood, animals to hunt, land to farm. Current archeological evidence shows the Hohokam were in the valley by around A.D. 300, and by A.D. 500 they had built canals in some areas extending as far as three miles from the Salt River. Research on the Hohokam has led to an understanding that their culture developed in stages. The chronology of these stages, or periods, has been debated by archeologists for years. The beginning of the earliest stage, called the Pioneer Period, has been dated as early as 300 B.C. and as late as A.D. 500, but indisputable evidence for either date has not been found. The date commonly used by archeologists for the beginning of the Pioneer Period is A.D. 300; the end date is around A.D. 700. During the Pioneer Period, the Hohokam lived in small, scattered villages in the Salt River and Gila River valleys. They gathered and hunted food, and they grew corn, beans, and squash. Their houses were squarishbrush houses with floors sunk below the surface of the ground. By the end of the period, they had built some canals for irrigating their fields. In the Colonial Period, from about A.D. 700 to A.D. 900, the Hohokam seem to have expanded their range over central and southern Arizona, and they became shell merchants. They obtained the shell from the Gulf of California, crafted it into jewelry, and traded it to other Indians to the north and east. They developed characteristic "red-on-buff" pottery with more sophisticated designs than those of the plainer Pioneer Period ware. Their brush "pithouses" became oval in shape, and they developed large "ball courts" for ceremonial purposes.

During the Sedentary Period, from about A.D. 900 to A.D. 1100, the Hohokam established their irrigation system more fully and developed a larger population base.They traded ever more widely, continued crafting and trading shell jewelry, and extended their agricultural development. With the Classic Period, from about A.D. 1100 to A.D. 1400, the Hohokam underwent such striking changes that early archeologists believed the people of this period were not descendents of the early Hohokam, but were another group of more advanced Indians, the Salado from the northeast. Archeological work in the last 30 years has, however, found solid evidence for the transition from Sedentary to Classic Hohokam culture. In the Classic Period, pithouses gave way to rectangular adobe buildings arranged within walled compounds. Some compounds also con-tained raised earthen platforms, on top of which were built the houses of political or religious leaders. A few very important sites also contain massive multistoried buildings called "big houses." One

LA CIUDAD ARCHEOLOGICAL SITE

Excavated house floors, canal system, ball court, and other features are shown on this Hohokam site map. The entire L-shaped project area was sampled with trenches, and the four village neighborhoods were intensively excavated.

The area southwest of the ball court contained no features and was probably used for agriculture.

A big house has been preserved at Casa Grande, Arizona.

Classic Period irrigation systems were developed farther away from the river, with more interconnecting canals linking villages to each other. The variety of ceramics also increased. To the red-on-buff pottery was added a polished red ware and pottery slipped red on the exterior with black and white decoration on the inside (called "Gila Polychrome").

All of the characteristics of the Classic Period Hohokam indicate that this was a developed culture, with governing elites who most probably had jurisdiction over the distribution of water to villages along the canal systems. Agriculture clearly flourished and supported an ever growing population. As many as 20,000 people lived in the Salt River Valley during the Classic Period.

Why the Hohokam disappeared so suddenly has long been a mystery. In A.D. 1000 their range throughout central and southern Arizona was extensive. Yet by A.D. 1400 only a few areas appear occupied, and during the "proto-historic" period before the Spanish arrived in the 1600s nothing indicates the Hohokam were around-at least the Hohokam as defined by archeologists. What can be said is that the Hohokam experienced a rapid and extensive population decline. The decline may have been caused by disease or by overdependence on irrigation water high in salts that accumulated in the ground and eventually made it impossible to grow crops.

But their disappearance poses only one mystery about the Hohokam. How they lived, what they ate, how they organized themselves, the timing of their development as a culture-all these questions challenge archeologists. Bit by bit, information is uncovered and theories are put forward. Rarely are the funds available for truly massive research projects, and when they are, the researchers count themselves lucky.

September, 1982: Early morning, Phoenix, Arizona. A team of three archeologists stands at the corner of Moreland Street and 20th Street, pointing, measuring, conferring over a clipboard. Along Moreland, the houses have been removed. There are just empty lots, deserted streets, and, curiously, street lights, telephone poles, and utility lines. This is the corridor of the Papago Freeway, a long-proposed and often-opposed, inner-city loop to connect Interstate 10 to the downtown area and the Maricopa Freeway to the south. The archeologists stop, consult a map, and fetch a metal rod from the equipment truck. With a few quick taps, the leader of the team drives the rod into the ground. With this seemingly insignificant step, one of the largest excavations of a Hohokam site begins.

The metal rod will serve as the main reference point for the excavation. For all of the records that will be kept over the next 10 months, this point will be used to locate every discovery. And the prospects for unearthing something are good. This is the site of La Ciudad [The City], a 30-acre tract of land adjacent to an area that turn-of-the-century archeologists identified as particularly rich. That area, now under St. Luke's Hospital on 18th Street, was mapped by amateur archeologist Omar Turney in 1929. He reported several large mounds and the remnants of canals and houses.

By contrast, La Ciudad now is flat. To the lay person there is no evidence of any prehistoric occupation except for the pottery sherds that litter the surface. But test excavations reveal there are remains of Hohokam houses and part of a canal angling in from the Salt River. The investigation at La Ciudad is being (ABOVE) The project staff debates strategy during the course of the fieldwork. Counterclockwise, from right, field director Kathy Henderson, principal investigator Glen Rice, crew chief Ann Howard, crew chief Mark Hackbarth, laboratory director Jody Kisselburg, senior researcher Randy McGuire (seated), crew chief Jeanne Swarthout, and crew chief Jeff McAlister.

Stone argillite vessels decorated with tadpoles and a horned toad were removed from the Hohokam site. The vessels may have been used as censers (vessels for burning incense). Artifacts are shown actual size.

Done by archeologists from Arizona State University in Tempe, for the Arizona Department of Transportation, the agency responsible for building the Papago Freeway. Controversy over the freeway held up construction for years. The electorate of Phoenix voted against it, and then for it. It was almost killed in various legal battles. Now, archeological investigations of two major sites along the freeway rightof-way are being undertaken to ensure that the negative impacts to archeological remains are "mitigated." In the jargon of environmental legislation, an adequate data recovery program will give clearance for construction to proceed. The two sites are La Ciudad on the east side of Phoenix, and Las Colinas (The Hills) on the west. Both are Hohokam sites. (The Las Colinas investigation was conducted by archeologists from the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona, Tucson.) October, 1982: Chief archeologist for the ASU team is Dr. Glen Rice. In early October, he supervises the excavation of the first trenches. Already the site is divided into 225 squares using a gridding system. Now a backhoe excavates a trench 20 meters long by 70 centimeters wide in each of the squares.

Dr. Rice peers into the first trenches and examines some of the already completed profile drawings of the sides of the trenches. The early work produces few prehistoric objects, but Dr. Rice is confident this picture will change. Back at the laboratory (a converted house at 21st Place and Moreland Street), he is asked about the use of backhoes on an archeological site.

He muses, "Are backhoes the enemies of the archeologist? Well, no, really. The point of an archeological investigation is to recover information, and we use whatever is relevant to do that - shovels, trowels, dental tools, brushes, and backhoes. Actually, Arizona archeologists have been using backhoes for the last two decades. We at ASU have added our own special twists."

And what will be accomplished by digging 225 trenches at La Ciudad?

"We'll know statistically where the features are clustered," he says. "We'll be able to profile the walls of the trenches and identify where there are house floors, or canals, or roasting pits, and then we'll begin to see what La Ciudad really looks like." Ever optimistic, Rice shrugs his shoulders and looks over the empty lots along the freeway route. "Who knows? There might be more than we think."

By all accounts, La Ciudad is somewhat of a lesser site. The archeological consensus is the "best stuff" went under the grader when St. Luke's Hospital was built. The La Ciudad site crossed by the freeway is a little to the north and east. As the excavation begins, the archeologists think it probably was an outskirt community, a single, contemporaneous, small village dating to the Sedentary Period of about A.D. 900-1100.

The biggest excavation of a Hohokam site was at Snaketown on the Gila River. This was primarily a Sedentary occupation. Dr. Emil Haury, University of Arizona, worked at the site in 1934 and returned for an intensive study in 1964-65. The work at Snaketown advanced the understanding of the Hohokam considerably. La Ciudad, in 1982, does not rival the size of Snaketown, but it offers the potential for building on the information which had been obtained from Snaketown. Before the

site was gridded, the archeologists decided on the research questions they most wanted to answer and developed a strategy for the excavation. Their primary question concerned how the pre-Classic Hohokam organized their villages spatially. Where did certain activities take place? Were the houses arranged around courtyards? They also wanted to know more about the subsistence of the Hohokam: what was used for food, what was cultivated? And they wanted to take the opportunity to date a large sample of materials carefully to help pin down any part of the Hohokam chronology that they could.

But in October, 1982, they do not know what the site of La Ciudad will hold. It will be mid-November before all of the trenches are cut and the profiles of the walls are made, revealing the true shape of La Ciudad.

January, 1983: Data from the trenching have been entered into a computer on the campus of Arizona State University. Some preliminary excavation has also expanded the sides of trenches that intersect the remains of Hohokam houses. Analysts have taken samples of pottery from the excavation and are looking at sherds for markings and colors indicating when the pottery was made. Kathy Henderson, an advanced graduate student at the university, is in charge of the fieldwork and will examine the pottery. Henderson and Rice go over their results, he with computer maps and she with the dates from the ceramic analysis. What they find surprises and excites them: La Ciudad is not quite what they thought. First, the computer maps reveal a clear pattern. There is a good-sized canal running diagonally (from the southeast to the northwest) through the site. Along the canal, on the west side, appears to be a string of villages. From the densities of the features inferred from the trenching, there are about five times as many houses as had been presumed.

The ceramic analysis is equally interesting. A strong pattern is established for dating the bulk of the site to the Colonial Period, between A.D. 700 and 900, rather than the later Sedentary Period. And, in some places, evidence suggests the site may have been occupied during the very early Pioneer Period, around A.D. 300 to 500. What was thought to be a lesser site is turning out to be a major one. Now the problem is how to mobilize the resources to excavate this bigger site before construction begins on the freeway. It almost surely means the fieldwork will continue well into the heat of summer.

June, 1983: The site of La Ciudad has been "opened up." Where there were vacant lots with desiccated scrub vegetation there are now open areas excavated a meter or more below the modern surface. Now the excavation focuses upon these open areas: horizontal exposures of the four villages along the canal. To help identify the villages, the archeologists name them after the closest streets: Brill, Belleview, Moreland, 21st/22nd streets. The emphasis is now on "controlled" excavation. This is done by hand, as opposed to "bulk" excavation with the backhoe or other heavy equipment. The crew looks for the floors of Hohokam houses and other features such as roasting pits and burials. The floors of houses are identified first through a series of controlled test units, in which all the material has been hand excavated and sifted through a screen. Once the depth and extent of the floor is established, a backhoe is used to remove the remainder of the fill overlying the floor. The skill of the machine operators comes into play as they are asked to clear off to within 20 centimeters of the floor. The final levels of soil are then removed with shovels, trowels, and brushes to expose the ancient plastered floors of the Hohokam houses. The superstructure of a typical Hohokam house was made of poles covered with brush and finished with a pack of mud or dirt. Virtually all remnants of the brush and wood supports are long vanished, but the floor remains, sunk below the surface of the ground, plastered with a lime-like soil called caliche quarried from another location, and rounded to meet the ground surface. An entryway shaped like a tongue was fashioned leading from the surface into the house. The houses were oval or squarish and varied greatly in size. The earliest houses, from the Pioneer Period, were sunk deep and had very large postholes. The houses of the later periods were more shallow and appear to have had smaller roof supports. At the doorway of the houses found at La Ciudad there would usually be a schist slab upright against the rounded lip of the floor. Just inside the entry would be a small round depression in the floor lined with clay. This was the hearth. These "pithouses" of the Hohokam are exposed by meticulous labor. When one is located, the dirt is removed and the floor cleaned with trowels and brushes. An innovation at La Ciudad is the use of a backpack blower, the type used typically to clean sidewalks and parking lots, for cleaning off house floors. In the process of getting to the floor and cleaning it off, the artifacts in the layer of dirt above the floor are delicately uncovered and removed. All the information about the floor and the artifacts associated with it is documented.

To complicate matters, the houses are usually found one on top of another. Probably a house did not last more than 20 or 25 years. Rain would erode the base and beat apart the brush exterior. Rodents and insects would infest the brush. Wear and tear would, in time, make the house uninhabitable. When this occurred, the Hohokam would destroy all but the floor and build a new house (including a new floor) over the abandoned house. In excavating the houses, then, there can be several overlapping house floors, from different time periods. There can also be trash pits under the floors and sometimes even burials.

Field laborers at archeological excavations have to be part workhorse and part academic. The labor is hard and tedious, but the hardest part is maintaining powers of observation and taking precise and detailed notes. At La Ciudad, the heat has become oppressive, so work begins at 5 A.M. The field workers go to work with the roofers. By 10 A.M. the temperature is approaching 100 degrees, and by afternoon a debilitating summer sun bakes the site. Lunch is at 10 A.M., providing a long working morning through the cool of the day, and workers tote a gallon jug of water to supplement the large communal cool-ers. Everyone dresses for the heat, and the ubiquitous dust.

As the fieldwork at La Ciudad peaks, about 80 people work on the project50 in the field, 20 in the labs washing and sorting the artifacts, and 10 in the office. The push is on to meet the targets set in the revised field strategy: to excavate 200 houses, 20 ovens, 100 trash pits, and 120 burials, plus 350 small test units from areas outside the features. People work to quotas: so many test units per day, so many sherds washed, so many levels of dirt moved.

The results of this effort are gratifying. Guests touring the site are taken to the Pioneer Period houses across from the lab, then guided to the corner of the Moreland location where a pattern is emerging to confirm theories about the spatial orga-nization of Hohokam communities. (See accompanying article.) At the Belleview cluster, visitors see a totally unexpected find. This is a ball court, a large oval-shaped arena measuring about 20 meters by 10 meters. While not rare, they are not commonly found, and there had been no indication whatsoever that one would be encountered at La Ciudad. Ball courts are usually oval and surrounded by an embankment of earth. They may have been used for playing a ritualistic ball game (using balls made of a rubbery substance derived from a form of cactus found in Mexico), or possibly for a highly formalized type of dance. Whatever their exact function, they were the Hohokam equivalent of a public building.

Usually, the location of a ball court is marked by a depressed area in the modern surface. But here there was no such indication. Moreover, the earth embankment appears to have been knocked down and spread over the floor of the ball court. Standing in the center of the court, senior researcher Dr. Randy McGuire points out the postholes found at the center of the oval and the outlines of a trash pit capped by the floor of the court. He is laconic and lean, a cowboy hat pulled low over one eye.

"We don't know exactly what happened here," says he, "but we think the ball court was abandoned, maybe when this community lost some of its power, and the center of influence moved down to the bigger community that's under St. Luke's Hospital." He points to the southwest, where St. Luke's stands. "Between here and there, our tests show there was nothingno houses, no occupation. We think that area was where the irrigated fields were."

North of the ball court is the Belleview cluster of houses. Part of Culver Street has been torn up to reveal a maze of Hohokam house floors, some of them only 10 centimeters below the bottom of the street pavement. In this area, the houses were built and rebuilt over perhaps hundreds of years. There are some houses with schist uprights imbedded in the floor, apparently to brace some kind of wooden flooring or act as bench supports.

On the outskirts of the cluster, there are massive roasting pits, some two meters deep. They seem to come in pairs, and their inner walls are made up of a thick rind of charcoal and blackened earth. The material in the roasting pits has been removed for analysis. Likely they were used for slow baking of desert plants, such as cholla and other forms of cactus. If this is borne out in the analysis of roasting pits at La Ciudad, the probable use of the pits is communal cooking, perhaps with alternating pits fired up to keep the food coming.

Beyond the Belleview cluster and to the east, the field crew working on the canal explains what the fine lines on the trench walls mean. There were two major canals, one a rebuild of the other, and a number of laterals running down to the fields. But the most intriguing discovery is a number of small reservoirs off the canal. What were they used for? The numerous broken pots that line the bottom of the reservoirs