Petroglyphs by Hohokam People in Saguaro National Park
The Hohokam (/hoʊhoʊˈkɑːm/) were an ancient Native American culture centered on the present-day US state of Arizona. The Hohokam are one of the four major cultures of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico in Southwestern archaeology. Considered part of the Oasisamerica tradition, the Hohokam established significant trading centers such as at Snaketown and are considered to be the builders of the original canal system around the Phoenix metropolitan area.
According to local oral tradition, the Hohokam may be the ancestors of the historic Pima and Tohono O'odham peoples in Southern Arizona. Recent academic research focused on the Sobaipuri, ancient ancestors of the modern Pima, indicates that Pima groups were present in the region at the end of the Hohokam sequence.
Hohokam, a term borrowed from the O'odham language, is used to define an archaeological culture that existed from the beginning of the common era to about the middle of the 15th century. As an abstract construct, this culture was centered on the middle Gila and lower Salt River drainages in what is known as the Phoenix basin. This is referred to as the Hohokam Core Area, as opposed to the Hohokam Peripheries; or adjacent regions into which the Hohokam Culture extended. Collectively, the Core and Peripheries formed what is referred to as the Hohokam Regional System, which occupied the northern or Upper Sonoran Desert in what is now Arizona. The Hohokam also extended into the Mogollon Rim region.
Within a larger context, the Hohokam culture area inhabited a central trade position between the Patayan situated along the Lower Colorado River and in southern California; the Trincheras of Sonora, Mexico; the Mogollon culture in eastern Arizona, southwest New Mexico, and northwest Chihuahua, Mexico; as well as the Ancestral Puebloans in northern Arizona, northern New Mexico, southwest Colorado, and southern Utah.
In North America, the Hohokam were the only culture to rely on irrigation canals to water their crops since as early as 800, and their irrigation systems supported the largest population in the Southwest by 1300. Archaeologists working at a major archaeological dig in the 1990s in the Tucson Basin, along the Santa Cruz River, identified a culture and people that were ancestors of the Hohokam that might have occupied southern Arizona as early as 2000 BCE. This prehistoric group from the Early Agricultural Period grew corn, lived year round in sedentary villages and developed sophisticated irrigation canals.
The Hohokam used the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers and constructed an assortment of simple canals combined with weirs in their various agricultural pursuits. Since the 9th century and extending into the 15th century, they maintained what was to become extensive irrigation networks that rivaled the complexity of those used in the ancient Near East, Egypt, and China. These were constructed using relatively simple excavation tools, without the benefit of advanced engineering technologies, and achieved drops of a few feet per mile, balancing erosion and siltation. Over 70 years of archaeological research has revealed that the Hohokam cultivated varieties of cotton, tobacco, maize, beans and squash, as well as harvested a vast assortment of wild plants. Late in the Hohokam Chronological Sequence, they also used extensive dry-farming systems, primarily to grow agave for food and fiber. Their reliance on agricultural strategies based on canal irrigation, vital in their less than hospitable desert environment and arid climate, provided the basis for the aggregation of rural populations into stable urban centers.
Overall, Hohokam villages and smaller settlements can be classified within the ranchería-tradition; these typically found near water and arable land, and identified by clusters of residential areas composed of discrete groups of habitation and utility structures combined with extramural use areas. Many features of early Hohokam domestic architecture, such as large square or rectangular pithouses, seem to have been transplanted relatively intact from early Formative Period examples first developed in the Tucson basin. But, by the seventh century, a distinct Hohokam architectural tradition emerged. Throughout the Hohokam Chronological Sequence, individual residential structures were normally excavated approximately 40 cm (16 in) below ground level, with plastered or compacted floors that covered between 12 and 35 m2, and featured a circular, bowl-shaped, clay-lined hearth situated near the wall-entry.
Hohokam burial practices varied over time. Initially, the primary method employed was flexed inhumation, similar to the tradition used by the southern Mogollon Culture, located immediately to the east. In the late Formative and Preclassic periods, the Hohokam cremated their dead, again strikingly similar to the traditions documented among the historic Patayan Culture situated to the west along the Lower Colorado River. Although the particulars of the practice changed somewhat, the Hohokam cremation tradition remained dominant until around 1300. At this time extended inhumation, similar to that used by the Salado tradition to the north and northeast, was quickly adopted. Also of interest, many of the details of the late Hohokam burial patterns were very similar to the tradition practiced by the historic Tohono and Akimel O'odham. www.wikipedia.com
MANIK
Kin 107: Blue Electric Hand
I activate in order to know
Bonding healing
I seal the store of accomplishment
With the electric tone of service
I am guided by the power of magic.
Other dimensions of experience exist of which we are currently unaware.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2015-2016.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Muladhara Chakra (Seli Plasma)
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