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The name for the people who inhabited the northern Sonoran Desert from about 300 B.C. to A.D. 1450, Hohokam, comes from the Pima people; in Piman, Hohokam means 'all used up.'
A farming people, the Hohokam occupied spread-out communities rather than closely-knit towns, lived year-round in the full heat of the Sonoran desert, and developed sophisticated and extensive canal systems for the irrigation of their crops. Much of the early knowledge of the Hohokam came from the works of archæologist Harold Gladwin and colleague Emil Haury, who excavated the Hohokam settlement of Snaketown, south of Phoenix, Arizona, beginning in 1934. Today, the 300 B.C. date which Gladwin and Haury proposed as the earliest emergence of the Hohokam people is doubted by some more recent researchers, and many believe that the Hohokam continue in modern Native American people including the Pima and the Tohono O'odham, but most chronologies agree that by around A.D. 1450, the Hohokam were gone...all used up.
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This site prepared as part of WestWeb by Warrick Bell and Catherine Lavender. Graphics © 1998, 1999 Warrick Bell.
Last modified 13 September 1999
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