Prehistoric Indians of the Southwest

by H. M. Wormington

There was a definite decline in some of the arts of the Hohokam. Carved stone vessels and palettes were no longer made. Pyrites mirrors are not found in this [horizon]. Shell work continued to flourish, although etching had disappeared. Heavy bracelets were made and true inlay and ceremonial shell trumpets[5] made their first appearance. These were west-coast conch shells with a hole ground into the tip of the spire. Blowing into the shell through this hole produces a trumpetlike sound.

Axes, both single and doublebitted, were beautifully made, and represented stone work at its peak. Projectile points were thin and well made. Usually they were long and triangular. Most of them had notches chipped at right angles but a few were unnotched. Edges were not serrated, as they had been in earlier times. Stone implements, presumably of Salado origin, were added to the [complex]. These included adzes, picks, chisels, crushers, club heads, flakes with serrated edges which served as saws, jar stoppers, pottery scrapers, and shaft straighteners.

Ball courts were greatly reduced in size by Classic times and it seems probable that the game played in them had lost much of its popularity. This belief is confirmed by the absence of a ball court at Los Muertos, one of the largest and most important villages. It seems likely that provisions would have been made at such a settlement for a sport which enjoyed much popular support. A ball court was found at Casa Grande, another important Classic site, however, so this [trait] had apparently not disappeared entirely.

It was in the realm of architecture that the greatest changes occurred. Even in Sedentary times, in the eastern part of the Hohokam area, there was a tendency for houses to become surface structures. During the early part of the Classic period, surface houses, sometimes with contiguous rooms, were built by the Hohokam. These changes were probably due to Salado influence, although the people themselves had not yet arrived in the area. Walls were still extremely thin and of typical Hohokam construction, so houses were no more than one story high.

With the arrival of the Salado people, the building of multi-storied houses with massive walls, enclosed in compounds, began. Two of the best known of these are El Pueblo de Los Muertos. (The City of the Dead)[56] which, before its destruction by farmers, lay a few miles south of Tempe, Arizona, and Casa Grande,[26] a great ruin, now a National Monument, which lies nine miles west of Florence, Arizona.

Los Muertos covered a large area and contained thirty-six communal buildings and many small houses. It was a settlement which could not have existed without irrigation, and ditches have been traced which brought water to it from the Salt River. The largest single building was a great rectangular house enclosed on all four sides by a massive wall which reached a thickness of seven feet in some places. Some of the outer walls of the big house achieved a comparable thickness. In addition to the main structure, the [compound] contained plazas and small house clusters. Another ruin contained two large house clusters. Here some of the rooms had very thin walls, as do the Hohokam houses of Sedentary and early Classic times.

At Los Muertos the Hohokam and the Salado people apparently lived side by side, each clinging for the most part to their own traditions. This divergence was particularly marked in the disposal of the dead. The Saladoans usually buried their dead under house floors or in the [plaza]. The body was normally extended, with the head to the east. Pottery, jewelry, and some stone artifacts served as grave offerings. The Hohokam continued to practice cremation. The dead were placed on wooden gratings over shallow pits, and the grating was consumed with the body. The unconsumed bones and ashes were placed in jars and buried in special plots near the refuse heaps. There seems to have been some borrowing between the two groups, for occasionally inhumations are found accompanied by the red-on-buff pottery of the Hohokam, and a few cremations have been found with Salado offerings or in polychrome vessels. This borrowing, however, seems to have been sufficiently limited to make it possible, on the basis of the numbers of burials and cremations, to estimate what the comparative ratio of Hohokam to Salado people may have been. On this basis, the Hohokam appear to have outnumbered the foreign element by a ratio of three to one.

Fig. 51—Great House built by the Salado people. Casa Grande National Monument, Arizona. (Courtesy National Park Service.)

The famous site of Casa Grande consists of a group of ruins made up of house clusters surrounded by [compound] walls. Both thin-walled, single-roomed houses and multiple-roomed structures with massive walls are represented. Of the latter, the outstanding example is a building known as the “Great House” which lies in an enclosure called Compound A. The Great House is four stories high, but only eleven rooms are represented. Originally there were five additional rooms on the ground floor, but these were filled in to form an artificial terrace. The rooms are arranged with one on the top floor and five rooms on each of the two lower stories. Some rooms were entered by small doors, and others through the roof. There were no windows. The walls of the Great House now stand some thirty-four feet above ground level and are over four feet thick. No forms were used, and the wall was constructed by a process of piling up layers of stiff [caliche] mud. Each course was patted into shape and then allowed to dry to receive the next course. The final finish was obtained by plastering with a thin mud mixture made with sieved caliche.