Whatever the answer, however, people remained, descendants of whom include the Pima and Tohono O'odham of southern Arizona.Akimel O’Otham Pee Posh Charter School and Blackwater Community School is located on the Gila River Indian Reservation southeast of Phoenix, AZ. The reservation is 583,748 square miles and consists of seven distinct districts with a population of 11,257 (2000 Census). The reservation has two distinct tribes the Akimel O’Otham (River People – Pima Indians and Pee Posh (Maricopa Indians). More importantly, is the historical status of this tribe which traces its ancestry to the Hohokam Indians which inhabited the Gila River Basin beginning in 300 B.C. Why this once-flourishing cultural pattern came to an end remains a mystery. Hohokam farmers truly had mastered the desert, in the sense that they were able to successfully grow crops in the same locations for hundreds of years and create a large, well-organized, prospering society. 1100s through 1400s, there were tens of thousands of Hohokam people living in large villages scattered throughout the Phoenix and Tucson basins. At the cultural peak of the Hohokam in the “Classic” period of the A.D. The Hohokam represent one of the largest and most complex societies in the Southwest. Hohokam villages also show that society was organized in a hierarchical fashion. Unlike ancient pueblo towns, which often were abandoned after a few decades, some Hohokam villages were continuously occupied for up to 1,500 years or more. Hohokam villages are remarkable in the ancient Southwest for their stability. Later, the low circular mounds were replaced by much larger, rectangular “platform mounds” of earth, rock, and adobe covered with structures and courtyards built on top. Early in the Hohokam cultural sequence these consisted of ball courts and small, low, circular mounds made of earth. Within the villages were monumental public works. Accompanying the canals were extensive villages that covered hundreds of acres and were occupied by several hundred people. Not even the complex societies in Mesoamerica had such extensive irrigation canals. In fact, the Hohokam had the largest and most complex irrigation systems of any culture in the New World north of Peru. The Hohokam are probably most famous for their creation of extensive irrigation canals along the Salt and Gila rivers. During this time, they achieved remarkable successes. 1450, barely 90 years before Spanish explorers arrived in the Southwest. The Hohokam were, in the words of archeologist Emil Haury, “masters of the desert.” Their cultural pattern existed from the first years A.D. Hohokam ruins at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument
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