The Hohokam engineered and built "the largest prehistoric irrigation system in North America," according to John P. While the Mogollon created a rich and distinctive legacy of images on stone and clay, the Hohokam produced extensive systems for irrigation, reached high levels of innovative craftsmanship, and responded dramatically to Mesoamerican influences. In a broad sense, the Hohokam and Mogollon followed parallel cultural pathways, but each also left a cultural signature. Like the Mogollon, they suffered unexplained cultural fragmentation and dislocation in the 15th century. During the last third of their history, they marched to the quickening beat of a puzzling change, concentrating in pithouses and large surface structures within towns with populations of several hundred to more than a thousand. During the first two thirds of their history, the Hohokam moved to the unhurried rhythms of their heritage, living in shallow pithouse lodges within villages which increased slowly in size and population over time. Like the Mogollon, the Hohokam left remnants of settled communities, fields and clay vessels to mark their emergence from their predominantly nomadic hunting and gathering traditions. These finds suggest the presence of Puebloan immigrants at Las Colinas during the time when the platform mounds and canal systems were in use.The Hohokam people – desert farmers who occupied the heart of Arizona and the northern part of Mexico’s Sonora from early in the first millennium to nearly the middle of the second millennium – followed a cultural development similar to that of their Mogollon neighbors to the east. In addition, one late-14th-century burial in Mound 8 was accompanied by a Phoenix Red bowl.
This same study showed that Phoenix Red and Roosevelt Red Ware at Las Colinas are chemically identical, suggesting local production of the latter. David Abbott and David Gregory (1988:19) later named this type Phoenix Red, and the results of a subsequent X-ray fluorescence analysis suggested that it was locally produced, using clay from the settling basins on the western edge of the site (Crown et al. Local production at Las Colinas is in accord with analyses indicating perforated plates are locally produced at virtually every settlement where they are encountered in quantity (Lyons 2003a Lyons and Lindsay 2006).Īt Las Colinas, Crown (1981:115, 149) also documented a distinctive red ware type with a restricted spatial distribution that was made using the coil-and-scrape technique associated with ancestral Puebloan groups. The local production of such utilitarian household objects, likely to reflect the process of enculturation rather than emulation (Carr 1995 Clark 2001), represents compelling evidence of the presence of northern immigrants or their descendants. Perforated plates were apparently used as base molds for ceramics and as potters' turntables (Christenson 1994 Lyons and Lindsay 2006), and petrographic analysis indicates this household implement was produced locally at Las Colinas (Elizabeth J. Las Colinas has yielded more perforated plates than any site in southern Arizona except for Reeve Ruin and the Davis Ranch site, in the San Pedro Valley, both of which are widely accepted by archaeologists as Kayenta enclaves (Clark and Lyons 2012 Lindsay 1987). Another three fragments were found during the 1982-1984 excavations (Arizona State Museum collections). Patricia Crown (1981:165) reported fragments of 69 different perforated plates recovered as a result of the 1968 excavations at Las Colinas.
Las Colinas and Los Muertos, however, at the distal ends of their canal systems, have yielded the most abundant traces of people practicing northern traditions. Perforated plates, Kayenta pottery-making tools (Lyons and Lindsay 2006), have been recovered from Los Muertos and Los Hornos, in Canal System 1 (Haury 1945:111-112, 180) Pueblo Grande, La Ciudad, and Las Colinas, in Canal System 2 (Crown 1981 Haury 1945:186 Wilcox 1987:203) and South Pueblo Blanco, in the Scottsdale Canal System (McDonnell et al. The presence of descendants of ancestral Puebloan groups from the Kayenta region of northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah frequently has been posited (Abbott 2003 Haury 1945 Lyons 2003a Lyons and Lindsay 2006). Pre-Classic ceramic assemblages from Las Colinas indicate the presence of a Yuman "barrio" at Las Colinas (Beckwith 1988 Teague 1989a:122-123) and co-residence of Hohokam and Patayan groups has been documented downstream on the lower Salt (Watkins and Rice 2010). Newcomers to the lower Salt included immigrants from Hohokam hinterlands, perhaps including the lower San Pedro River Valley, Tonto Basin, and Verde Valley.