Red on Buff

My introduction to the Hohokam motivated us to visit the Arizona State Museum on the campus of the UofA. Shari and I had been there once before several years back. Now we wanted to look at the distinctive Hohokam red on buff pottery.

The museum boasts over 20,000 whole vessels, the world's largest collection of Southwest Indian pottery, but only a tiny sample is on public display. We'd forgotten that the public exhibit is small. There is something about being stuck in a museum which makes it tough to relate to an object.

From the one public room, through a mostly glass wall, one can see into the climate-controlled storage room with racks and racks of pots, plates and figures. That looked intriguing. Neatly organized centuries and millennia.

The public display includes a wall with examples of all kinds of pottery from the various cultures that flourished in the Southwest and northern Mexico. There is an impressive display of photographs of that wall at the museum website. You can see the entire wall, each column, each shelf, and each piece.

The other side of the public area has a display entitled "Paths of Life: American Indians of the Southwest," beginning with the Seri, Tarahumara and Yaqui who are in Mexico. Which raises the odd fact that the U.S.-Mexico border cuts across land traversed by many a people and culture over millennia, including today.

Being confronted with such a great diversity of cultures and languages, I thought of a native language map of the Americas that I saw in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City: scores and scores of languages quite unrelated to each other, making Europe and Asia look quite homogenous.

Somewhere in that museum were samples of artifacts from different cultures in Mexico, among them a culture around Casas Grandes in Chihuahua, Mexico, possibly related to the Mogollan cultures, that flourished about the same time as the Hohokam, a connection between Arizona and the Toltec-Aztec polities in the Mexico City area. Curious. Like the Hohokam, the Casas Grandes culture mysteriously disappeared around 1450. So was it before Columbus, or were they killed off after European diseases struck?

We Europeans live in a continent where populations, cultures and technology flourished equal to any in the Old World. Sadly, we have little awareness of the old spirits.