ASB 222 - Buried Civilizations of the Americas - Keith Kintigh

Lecture 26: Platform Mounds, Canals, & Complexity: The Classic Period Hohokam

Originally, the "Red on Buff Culture," because of red on buff pottery through the Preclassic
The Sonoran Desert, quite rich for hunting & gathering and agriculture, (more than the Plateau where Ancestral Pueblo people lived). <Why?>
There was an early reliance on irrigation agriculture, especially in the Salt and Gila River drainages.

Major source of debate; mainly radiocarbon and archaeomagnetic dating w/ associated errors and problems; also, often a lack of dateable material
Periods

A Preclassic center of Hohokam culture seems to be Snaketown excavated by Emil Haury, near where the freeway crosses the Gila River. Until recently most information based on this, atypical, site w/ long occupation & weak chronology
Courtyard groups 1-6 pithouses facing a courtyard, representing a household.
Plaza - larger sites seem to have a vacant area reserved in the center
Ranchería settlement pattern - some sites show this pattern of dispersed clusters of houses over a large area (historic Pima & Tohono O'odam too)
Canals

Reach 20 mi long, essentially size and length of historic canals, but much more extensive. Start to be large scale in the Colonial period.
Jerry Howard has dated canals; shows they must be built with plan in mind, can't just be added to as needed.

Hohokam ballcourts are less formal than Mesoamerican; oval embankments open at each end ca. 1m high;
Primarily date to Colonial and Sedentary; maximum extent in Sedentary; 193 at 154 sites; 154-2000m²; from 10x18m to 32x83m;
Sites w/o ball courts in clusters with sites with a single ball court; each cluster has one site with 2 ball courts as its political center
Seems to indicate a political or ritual hierarchy and the existence of a "Ball Court System", argued by David Wilcox to be a regional political system 400km E-W x 500km N-S; its densest distristibution in the Phoenix Basin

Instead of courtyard groups of pithouses, above-ground rectangular adobe compounds, subdivided with adobe walls into rooms, more like pueblos. Pithouses disappear.

Ballcourts are no longer built, fall out of use
Platform mounds are the public architectural hallmark of the Classic (a few are earlier).
Rectangular earthen mounds with heavy adobe walls often capped w/ caliche. Variety of construction techniques. Largest 90x60x10m Pueblo Grande (Go and Visit)
Within rectangular compounds
42 in Salt and Gila River Basins, ca. 3 miles apart; others Tucson Basin, Papaguería; almost all in Salt-Gila Drainage along major canals
Some have palisades.

Where control of water is critical, the need to manage the water leads to centralization & ultimately to state formation
<Where does this suggest the central sites should be with respect to the canals?>
<Casa Grande and Los Muertos are at the end of canal; Pueblo Grande and Mesa Grande are at the heads>
<Do canals require a managerial elite? >
? Ethnographic evidence suggests no.

Chiefdom? 10 years ago, archaeologists thought there was considerable complexity in the Classic Period Hohokam. This was argued because of Classic period move to residences on top of platform mounds ca 1250. But, few rich graves.
David Abbott's Argument - Sedentary/Early Classic-Late Classic

Highly specific sourcing of ceramic pastes (clay) and temper (inclusions in the paste). Based on differential geology of the mountains surrounding the basin and their decomposition into clays. (Associate temper w/ rocks petrographically, and clays with sediments using a microprobe.) This permits sourcing thousands of ceramic to about a dozen different zones and allows you to see how it moves due to exchange.
Social Models:

Sedentary - household by household ties - mixed ceramics within clusters of houses;
Classic - compounds similar w/i and different between, suggests increased hierarchy and control. Also increased trade between canal systems.
Some evidence that communities were N/S rather than along canals
Some mounds palisaded to cut off access

A given canal was designed at one time
By the Classic period, all the water is used; perhaps 40,000 people in the basin
Salinization and degradation of the natural environment.
There are always human impacts, some larger than others

Due to major flood washing out the headgates in the 1450s (based on streamflow reconstructed from snowmelt?
Social causes?
Spanish entrada?