Underlying Phoenix

Phoenix basin, view from South Mountain.

Phoenix is confirmation that we made the right choice to live in Tucson.

Some 4.2 million people live in a huge sprawl of houses, six-lane streets, freeways, shopping centers, industrial sites, and office buildings variously called Phoenix, Tempe, Glendale, Peoria, Mesa, Chandler and Scottsdale. As some Tucsonans have described it to us, it's like living in L.A.

When we were migrating between Whidbey and Tucson, we either avoided Peenix or drove through and past it. I had some curiosity about the place, but Shari wouldn't let me get off the freeway. From its many freeways, there wasn't much to see that was inviting.

Park of the Canals, Mesa.

When a sister needed a ride back to Mesa, I got to see tragically sad developments: impressive entrance gates, blocks and blocks of little houses, all pretty much the same shape, compressed together, driveways and garage doors, tiny manicured gravel yards with an occasional cactus. The most nightmarish feature was that every house was painted with the identical color.

A friend flew into Phoenix to attend a conference in Scottsdale. I drove up to bring her back home. So I can say I've also been to Scottsdale. But I don't think I really have been because Scottsdale is supposed to be impressive and I was not impressed driving its main street.

Then a few weeks back, another sister flew into Peenix to attend spring graining in Peoria. I finally got my chance to explore for a couple of days. Peenix has its attractions. The ones that interested me the most were the remaining Hohokam sites.

The platform mound at Pueblo Grande.

There was a time -- before the Corps of Engineers, commercial cotton and citrus farming, and climate change -- when the Salt and Gila Rivers flowed through the Phoenix basin year round. The Hohokam excelled in creating extensive irrigation canal systems that supported agriculture, fishing, water fowl, and the largest concentration of Hohokam settlements.

In the Park of the Canals, a somewhat shabby looking place in Mesa, one can see a remnant of the Hohokam canals. When the Merkins replaced Mexicans and O'odham to settle and farm, engineers laid out irrigation lines using the ancient Hohokam canals.

The ball court at Pueblo Grande.

The Pueblo Grande Museum, just east of downtown Phoenix, is the site of one of the largest Hohokam settlements, one that probably controlled access to the Salt River waters and therefore grew politically. It has a partially restored ball court and a large platform mound.

The museum itself is well worth the visit. Now the area is desert scrub scattered with industrial buildings, and the nearby Phoenix Sky Harbor airport looks barren and ugly. But the museum can excite the imagination to wonder how the small Hohokam city flourished among water streams and irrigated fields.

Which is what my sister's companion remarked taking in the view of the Phoenix basin from the top of South Mountain: Imagine what this vast area looked like when water flowed and it was farmed by the Hohokam.

Typical Desert Botanical Garden sculpture (on the left).

There are things to see in Peenix. Driving around trying to find Park of the Canals and then Pueblo Grande, then the motel in Glendale, I got to see downtown Tempe and Phoenix. I can see why ASU is a popular party school. Downtown Tempe is impressive. There's money in serving beer and pizza to college kids.

My sister, her friend, and I spent a wonderful couple of hours at the Desert Botanical Garden, beautifully laid out and maintained. Gourmet food in its main restaurant, an $18 admission, and a pleasant Sunday, it was crowded with better heeled sorts. The metal sculptures in the park were silly, perhaps reflecting the tastes and personal friendships of the museum's trustees. But the succulent gardens are spectacular.

There remain plenty of other sights I would like to see in Peenix, but I wouldn't want to live there.

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.

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.