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Imagine: this desert is your home. You know when the seasons change, how the plants grow, where the animals hide. You know the gentle rains of the cool months, and you know the hot months, too, when temperatures soar and dust storms obscure the horizon. Weeks pass wthout any rain, and when at last it comes, it is with violent thunderstorms. The summer months are not easy, but this is your home. The Sonoran Desert is a harsh land. Annual rainfall averages only 8 inches and temperatures can reach 120 degrees. This was the Stone Age. These are the Hohokam People.
Take a look across the compound. Imagine how the Hohokam used ingenuity and hard work to adapt successfully to the desert. Using stone-age technology, they built a civilization that lasted over a thousand years. Their archetectural tradition culminated in the construction of the Casa Grande.
The ruins of the Casa Grande remind us of the rise and fall of the first known civilization in Arizona. But many questions remain unanswered. Some of the answers lie buried beneath the ruins of this and other Hohokam settlements, but time is running out. Throughout Arizona, archeological sites are being destroyed at a rapidly inceasing rate by development, vandalism and pothnting. Igf some of these sites are not prserved for future scientific study, man important chapters of American prehistory will be lost forever.
The face of the desert has changed since the time of the Hohokam. Modern agricultural irigation has resulted in a dramatic drop in the ground water table--from about 12 feet below the surface in 1930 to over 100 feet below the surface today. This accounts for the many dead mesquite trees in the park. Natural resources available to the Hohokam no onger thrive under our changed conditions.
This tribe slowly went out of existence due to the mass of people and either drought or flooding. Regardless of the problems, life was still possible in the desert, but not for so many people as before. In the late 1600s, Spanish explorers in southern Arizona found many small farming villages of the O'odham (Pima and Papago Indians), who may be the descendants of the Hohokam. Archeologists often use information on traditional O'odham practices to help them understand what they find in Hohokam archeological sites.
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