Of Hohokam Origins and Other Matters

Hayden, Julian

The present weight of evidence indicates that the Sierra Pinacate, Sonora, was an enclave occupied continiously from the end of the Alitihermal period by people of the Amargosa complex, who, as Areneflos, spoke a dialect of Papago in historic times. It is proposed that the Amargosans spoke an ancestral Piman tongue and that the present range of Pima speakers, from the Gila River to the Rio Anatiago in Jalisco, represents the extent of the Amargosan occupation. At the extreme southern end of the range. Amargosans were in contact with Mesoamrican culture, and they acquired pottery making, canal irrigation, and other specialized traits from this contact. Given the corridor of Pima speakers from south to north, a group of these southern people is thought to have brought the Vahki phase of the Hohokam, en bloc, to Snaketown on the Gila River, about 300 B.C. There the culture developed and expanded until A.D. 1400, with varing rates of accretions of traits and immigrants from the homeland. At that time, Pima-speaking Sobalpuri from the east, belonging to the Sonoran Brownware tradition, invaded the Hohokam territory and conquered it. Descendants of captive Hohokam survive as the Buzzard and Red Ant moieties of the Papago and Pima. Yuma entry into the Southwest is thought to be late, opposing Schroeder's Hakatayan theory. A redefinition of the term 'Hohokam' is proposed. It is suggested that this term be confined to the culture pattern which developed in the Gila Valley and thus to separate the Hohokam from those Amargosans who developed in the Sonoran Brownware tradition, who might be called the 'Ootam.'

Of Hohokam Origins and Other Matters

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