Ancient Ones: Anasazi Neighbors

In the last episode we talked extensively about that all important culture and population center of the Southwest that is Chaco Canyon and the Anasazi People that inhabited it and many times throughout the episode I mentioned the Hohokam and the Mogollon and I said I would cover them briefly buuut… I never did. I recorded their segments but it didn’t quite fit into the episode so I figured I would release it later as a small episode before the next two big ones of the Anasazi’s unraveling and the later Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Truthfully, there were amazing things going on in the area of the Southwest beyond what was happening in that blasted mustard colored canyon. Let’s open the discussion with this quote from Lekson:

Chaco had no business being a state but (as we shall see) it was; Hohokam should have been a state- and a respectable one at that- but (we think) it wasn't. End quote. So let’s shift over to the modern day Phoenix Area and discover a little bit about these Hohokam.

Around AD700, there seems to be enough regional variation in the style of pottery of the Southwest to allow researchers to separate the area into three groups. We know one of them, the Anasazi, another is the Mogollon, which we’ll talk about shortly, and then there’s the Hohokam.

Most of their fun begins right before Chaco takes off, and it’s explosive growth forces a geopolitical reaction in Chaco itself to either rise up or get knocked off. As we know, Chaco rises up at the same time that the Hohokam seemingly collapse and the two aren’t unrelated. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves… dang, we really just cannot avoid those Anasazi… well, neither could anyone else in the Southwest at the time. Anyways, Plog says this of the Hohokam who, quote, inhabited the stark and arid desert areas of southern Arizona south of the Mogollon rim, and extreme northern Mexico, with settlements extending northward toward flagstaff during some periods. End quote.

The first time I ever visited the Southwest was when I was 17 years old with my family. We had just moved from Georgia to Oklahoma and so our vacation destinations opened up a bit from the beaches of the Atlantic in Florida or the beaches of the gulf in Florida or the beaches of the Atlantic in South Carolina to… well, the entire western half of the US. Our first family excursion was to Sedona, which I knew nothing about. I am still very grateful for that trip because it planted and pollinated the flower in me that is my love of the Southwest. At the time I was only obsessed with the Maya but the ruins we visited in the sandstone canyons and red country of Sedona were equally as exciting! Plus… there were ball courts! Mesoamerican style ball courts in Arizona? Not only did the Hohokam have Mesoamerican ball courts but also platform mounds, and even a rubber ball from central America, three things very very Maya to my high school brain.

To explain my love of the ball courts I’ll just say that in college I wrote a 20 page paper suggesting that the civilizations of Mesoamerica like the Olmec and later Maya formed and began out of the ball game. The first buildings in central America, or at least the oldest monumental architecture found in central America and southern north America is the ball court and I suggested communities built a court and people would host feasts and parties at said court, and those hosts would no doubt be ball players who would eventually own teams… they’d be looked at as community leaders to solve issues in the area and then…before you know it, you’ve got temples with nine tiers, ritual flaying ceremonies… you know… where they peel the skin off of a living captive before the specialized priest wore it, and those 40 ton, 15 foot tall, giant olmec heads complete with ballgame helmets that are scattered across the jungle floor of the continent which probably represented ball player kings. I have no idea if that theory is still relevant, I wrote that 15 years ago although I would be curious to see how it holds up. Last thing I’ll say about that is I did see new evidence that people’s remains, like their dead body, were used to vulcanize rubber in the Maya lands… possibly even the rulers of cities which had ball courts. Nothing like giving it your all, coach!

So, the Hohokam of Arizona had Maya style ball courts and platform mounds like the Maya, awesome. They also imported Macaw feathers, copper bells, and shells from Mexico. Not to mention ceramics from the Anasazi and Mogollon. But on a smaller scale, the people lived just as their ancestors had and neighbors did; in shallow pit houses. Different from their neighbors to the northeast though, the Hohokam habitually cremated their dead and had for a very long time. They also painted their ceramic vessels with red paint that had geometric and life forms decorating them. They too grew corns, beans, and squash but also cotton and agave. They gathered cactus fruits and mesquite beans and hunted rabbits and deer. The Hohokam are probably most famous for their extensive canal network that is both still visible and still in use right up to today by the city of Phoenix and its suburbs. A few of these canals and ditches run for 10 to 15 miles from the main water source of the Gila and Salt Rivers. As Lekson puts it, quote, Phoenix is famously not tropical; but the ancient investment in canal irrigation created agricultural potentials that approached tropical (agricultural) conditions, transforming the stinking desert to garden spot. As far as the crops knew, the valley of the sun was rather like a rainforest. End quote.

The Hohokam’s religious practices and architecture are more similar to their southern neighbors in Mexico like the Maya groups than the puebloans which is most likely because the geography dictated that trade with people to the south and the west was easier than with people to the north and the east. But clearly the Hohokam were enamored with the South, even to the point of transforming their landscape into a southern one.

The first mesoamerican style ball court was constructed in the 8th century which also coincided with a rapid increase in the population and number of irrigation ditches with those canals. And coincides with the creation of a southern style government in Chaco… hm… By AD 1000, there were two dozen ball courts in the Hohokam region with platform mounds and special crematory areas accompanying them but that number would quickly increase. Out of the thousands of Hohokam village sites, 225 have ball courts that archaeologists know of so far. Most of those ball courts exist within 60 miles of a place known as Snaketown, which is the largest Hohokam site, at this time, and is located near Phoenix. It housed around 500 people by the mid 11th Century, had two impressive ball courts, and large houses and crematory pits in the center of town. Plog points out that archaeologist David Wilcox not only believes the ball courts were constructed in a manner relating to ceremony but that he also, quote, believes that the ball court may have served as a sacred context for settling feuds, creating social alliances, and promoting trade among the growing number of hohokam communities. End quote.

Those larger houses with ball courts nearby, big crematory structures, and the mere existence of the canal system definitely suggest some sort of hierarchy that existed for the Hohokam. While the Hohokam suffer a lot less from the Pueblo Mystique since… modern pueblos don’t seem to have descended from the people, but they still have that Southwestern bias of shying away from being labeled as having a ruler. But there is nowhere else on earth that has this many controlled and regulated canals that doesn’t also have a king or at least a bureau of canals ran by a group of maybe princely chiefs?

The most important Hohokam villages in the Phoenix Basin later on were scattered along the major irrigation canals which distributed that precious precious water. These villages were about 3 miles apart, all comparable in size, and were typically located at the ends of canal networks. There, they served as the primary administrative and ritual centers and coordinated canal use and probably resolved conflicts over said precious water. Some of these villages may have housed 1,000 people. The most important of these villages is known to us as Mesa Grande and it had a special enclosed compound and ball court.

Just like the Anasazi, the Hohokam filled every nook and cranny they could as population exploded in the 1100s. The area they occupied increased threefold as they inhabited more and more difficult areas to irrigate and farm with steeper slopes and less predictable water. They were also constructing large houses, great mounds that overlooked the land, and quite a few highly defensible hilltop forts, suggesting conflict and competition were brewing. And very curiously, while this construction was booming, the building of ball courts, subsided. Now here’s where our story somewhat overlaps with Chaco which never subjugated the Hohokam but definitely began to excerpt some meaningful influence over them.

By the early 1100s, just as Chaco began to rise, these ball court villages of the Hohokam had seemingly collapsed during a period of rapid change and many places are abandoned. Where people stayed, there are clear signs of social reorganization and further change. Populations continued to rise but were concentrated in a more limited number of locations as newer towns were planned, built, and settled in. It’s believed the Phoenix Basin reached a population of up to 60,000 people, all of them living along the extensive canal system, which is one of the densest populations in north America in all of prehistory! But cultural aspects also changed for the Hohokam. They began burying a larger number of their dead as opposed to cremating them, which they had done for a very very long time. Some of those burials were in cemeteries while others were in the floor or walls of their expanding pueblos… imagine plastering over the body of your loved ones and sleeping next to them each night as they’re entombed in the walls around you… Anyways, ornate ritual artifacts like projectile points, stone bowls, and others which had been important, virtually disappeared. Even their architecture changed rapidly. Instead of ball courts, more platform mounds began to rise up. And some of these platform mounds were enormous with one such platform requiring one million two hundred and thirty-five thousand cubic feet of earth fill to create. That’s a lot of people and a lot of hours and a lot of hard work.

Another curious factor of change is the fact that they began to hide their rituals from some people within the community. The Hohokam began to build walls around their platform mounds and structures on top of them. It seems the ballcourts that were still around by 1250 weren’t used for ceremonies anymore but instead only these massive mounds were and not everyone was able to participate. Plog suggests that this is because the elites were hiding ritual knowledge which is probably true, yes. But what if they weren’t hiding their ritual knowledge from people within their own community but instead from newcomers from the north? People asking for sanctuary as the spiral unraveled in that Mustard colored valley. People from a different culture who shouldn’t be allowed sacred or important ritual knowledge. Regardless of the reason for the protection of their culture; hierarchy, competition, alliances, divisions, and politics existed at this time for the Hohokam.

But like the Anasazi, the Hohokam’s fate was already sealed by the 13th century and soon they too will have disappeared. How much influence the Chacoans had over that is for the next episode. From Lekson… In the thirteenth century, the phoenix basin was teeming with people, several tens of thousands. They did wonderful things-developments economic, political, and artistic- that in my opinion, overshadowed Chaco; all supported by a truly remarkable infrastructure of irrigation canals. By 1450, only a few ragged settlements remained. Of course, that story is contested, but David Abbott’s 2003 book, centuries of decline during the hohokam classic period, tells a pretty grim tale. It’s hard to imagine a more complete collapse.

One more quote from Lekson: Chaco rose as Hohokam fell. Mimbres was contemporary with both; early Mimbres was clearly cozy with hohokam and later Mimbres looked a lot like Chaco. End quote. He says Mimbres but let’s talk about the larger group known as the Mogollon…

The Mogollon lived to the north and to the east of the Hohokam in a remarkably different landscape. It’s kind of amazing how different the Phoenix basin is from the area around the Mogollon Rim which is the colder, wetter, more wooded, and more mountainous area of Central Arizona and West Central New Mexico, especially considering how close the two are. Although, some Mogollon did live in the drier areas of Southern New Mexico, Western Texas, and Northern Mexico.

I’ve travelled through the Mogollon Rim twice now and both times was… uneasy to say the least. The first time was in 2020 when I saw an amazing ruin on the edge of a green mesa surrounded by mountains near the Agua Fria National Monument. I bounced over rocky terrain with my four wheel drive until I parked outside of a crumbled wall that used to surround an impressively large pueblo. I walked amongst the ruins and held potsherds in my hand as the sun began setting. I was going to camp right there in the bed of my truck but an uneasy feeling came over me so I left for a respectable distance. When I found a spot by a river I jumped out the truck and looked down in the wet dirt where I saw the print of a lion’s paw and remembered my friend’s mother telling me that very morning when I visited them in Phoenix to be careful because a Lion attack had recently occurred in those mountains. I slept elsewhere, with my Walther under my pillow.

The second time was this year, in April on my way to move to California from Wisconsin. I was taking a detour and visiting that same friend’s family except he too would be there this time. I woke up before dawn with my old dog, Echo after spending the night at an important Anasazi site I’ll talk about next episode called Homolovi State Park in Arizona. I then drove south through the national forest on 87 when the first rays started to rise through the trees. The area is incredibly beautiful, I couldn’t believe I'd never been and despite what’s about to happen, I’m definitely returning again. TALK ABOUT THE ELK. It spooked me… it took me hours to shake the feeling like I had just seen something I should not have seen. Maybe a hunter had shot it’s face and it had survived or more likely, maybe it had gotten into a fight with another male who seriously wrecked him but he still lived… but I will never forget that human face stuck in a silent scream that adorned that Elk’s head…

So anyways, that’s the Mogollon Region… honestly, I can’t wait to explore it more. But back to the people… They too began their structures in pit houses like the rest of the southwest’s ancestors, but by the 10th Century, they’d begun to erect above ground houses kinda like the Anasazi up north and without a doubt having been influenced by them. They had kivas also like the Anasazi, except some were rectangular. They buried their dead in shallow graves, often times under the floors of rooms in houses. They would then cover the deceased’s head with a Mimbres style pottery bowl that was upside and that had a whole punched in the bottom. Mimbres style pottery is a very famous and beautiful subgroup of Mogollon pottery that is a beautiful black on white. Some of the bowls had geometric designs while others showcased animals. Some have humans beheading each other with long knives as the neck entrails curled out. It’s gnarly stuff. Quick side note, some of the sources I will quote will use Mimbres and Mogollon almost interchangeably.

The Mogollon region is characterized by a bit more stability and continuity than the other two regions although that will change when Chaco and the Anasazi begin to trickle into the area. As the population grew and the land began to be plowed for agriculture, the trees, which there were plenty of, but the trees needed to sustain tool making, structure building, and fire fuel disappeared. With these trees also disappeared the big game that use the forests and rain most likely slowed as desertification set in. It’s most likely that the people pushed the land beyond its ability to sustain them, and it’s most likely that they had some help from those Northerners we’ve talked so much about.

By the 12th century, the Mogollon culture and people vanished like the Anasazi and Hohokam with no more pottery of this kind being produced. But it appears that the vanishing was orderly and most of their belongings were packed up and moved… but that’s for next episode.

The last group I’ll briefly mention is the Fremont. The Fremont are as Burrillo puts it, the Ancestral Puebloans cousins in the Great Basin. They too switched to Agriculture from foraging with the Anasazi… and the bow and arrow and ceramics also accompanied the transition. Here’s Burrillo with more, quote, the Fremont remained contemporaneous with the Ancestral Pueblo right up until both of them abdicated the Colorado Plateau (hence their being often characterized as cousins, along with what I'm told is intriguing DNA evidence). They shared a few things in common besides farming, but there are hard distinctions between them. Rock art and other decorative styles, for a start--the Fremont made pictographs, petroglyphs, distinctive clay figurines, and an assortment of personal accoutrements that set them apart from every other North American material culture. They also wore moccasins, for the most part, rather than the woven sandals preferred by ancient and historic Pueblo folks.

They tempered their ceramics with crushed volcanic rock, like basalt, instead of crushed old ceramics like the later Pueblo potters did. Their projectile points were unique to their culture areas. And they never built any cliff "dwellings,; although they were deft hands at high-altitude cliff granaries. End quote. Boy howdy, have I seen those high altitude cliff granaries and they are awesome.

So now you’re caught up with all the major players of the next few hundred years of tumultuous spiraling out of control that will see incredible violence, disruption, the formation of the Modern Pueblos, and the disappearance of the Anasazi.