Casa Grande

Casa Grande, the Great House, abandoned by the
Hohokam c. 1450.  (Its modern shelter has been edited out.)

For some time, a few years actually, I'd wanted to see Casa Grande, about ninety miles northeast of Tucson. Drive another forty minutes and you are in Phoenix, which is one reason I hadn't. Plus modern Casa Grande is a bit of a blight on a flat landscape, despite Bristol Palin's purchase of a house there. What I wanted to see was the Casa Grande National Monument. So on a down day a couple of weeks ago, I went there.

I took a roundabout route, driving up to Oracle, then down into the San Pedro valley, then up to Globe, a mining town east of Phoenix, and downstream past oddly named Miami and a hamlet called Top-of-the-World, then across the basin to Casa Grande. The scenery all along this route is stunning, despite several open pit mines.

Looking southeast from Oracle area.

I ended up driving through the eastern periphery of the land where the Hohokam lived, a people and a culture that developed and flourished in the Tucson and Phoenix basins for a millennia, then abandoned it all around 1450 AD. On the Santa Cruz, Gila and Salt Rivers, they built the largest network of irrigation canals in North America. In the late 1800's when American settlers developed farmlands in the Phoenix basin, they pretty much used the ancient canals as a footprint for their own irrigation systems. Most of what we know about the Hohokam has been discovered over the last two decades. Some 160 sites, over 200 ball courts (c. 900-1100 AD), and almost as many platform mounds (c. 1200-1350) have been identified.

Casa Grande with its shelter.

Casa Grande is the largest remaining Hohokam structure. In 1694, Father Kino, the Jesuit missionary who founded most of the Spanish mission settlements in the Southwest, described the ruin in his journal as the "Great House," which name stuck. Juan Bautista de Anza stayed there in 1775 on his expedition that founded San Francisco.

When it was in use, around the Great House stood platform mounds, ball courts, and many groups of courtyard arranged dwellings. Estimates of Hohokam communities run about 5,000. Just the Phoenix area would have had a population of 100,000.

Today, Casa Grande National Monument is a small, barren site with a nice visitors center and the area around the Great House nicely cleared, fenced, and labeled. Entry into the building is forbidden. Centuries of white man graffiti is a visible reason why. From a picnic area on the other side of the parking lot, signs identify nearby, scrub-covered mounds as platforms and a ball court.

The site is surrounded by dry, flat land and the occasional shock of rectangular green cotton fields. Yes folks, thanks to the Corps of Engineers and farmers' prior water rights, we mine water to grow cotton in the desert. Which is a major reason why the water table has been sucked down and most of our rivers don't flow much any more. At least the cotton fields give an indication of the green Hohokam fields that would have been visible a thousand years ago.

Hohokam ballcourt sites, 700-1150 AD

from The Hohokam Millennium (2007)

At the visitors center at the Monument, I bought The Hohokam Millennium, a richly illustrated collection of articles by current experts in various fields. It's a fascinating read.

I began to realize that Phoenix and Tucson are built over scores and hundreds of sites where Hohokam lived for a millennium. Thanks to modern laws requiring archeological surveys before construction, many sites have been examined. But Hohokam lands have been plowed under and built over. All that's left of one of the two largest platform mounds, Mesa Grande, is surrounded by urban development.

Now when I look at the surrounding mountains, or wonder at the saguaro cactus and other plants that thrive in the Sonoran Desert, I think of the long history of peoples who lived here. This place is not only stunningly beautiful, it's also full of life. There are spirits of peoples and cultures here about whom we know only little.

I am planning on doing more exploring, starting with the Hohokam exhibits at the Arizona State Museum on the UofA campus here in town.