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If you ask this question of the archeological establishment today, the answer you are likely to receive is something like "Darned, if we know!" 

Whoever they were, they appeared and disappeared suddenly with about 1500 years in between. Phoenix where the Salt and Gila rivers meet was their center, and the site of the present-day Pueblo Grande Museum and Archeological Park near Sky Harbor is believed to have been their capital city, with an area population at its height of 50,000 people--the greatest civilization of North America, excluding Mexico.

Their name means "the vanished ones" in the modern Pima Indian or O'odham language. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community located in the metropolitan Phoenix area now occupy the Hohokam homeland, although they and the related Papago (Tohono or Desert O'odham) are ambivalent about whether they are the descendants or conquerors of the Hohokam.

Harold Sterling Goodwin, who first discovered the Hohokam in his excavations of Snaketown in the 1920s, thought they were a Central American culture like the Maya or Zapotec. It is true that when they showed up about a century before the Common Era, they brought pottery, corn and beans agriculture and sophisticated canal irrigation, and that none of these arts indicate any preliminary or introductory stages of development in the Arizona archeological record. It would be 800 more years before the truly indigenous Indians (called Basketweavers) acquired pottery and the other appurtenances of civilization, including the village architecture we call Puebloan.

A giant in Southwestern archeology, Goodwin fell from grace in the 1940s when he had the audacity to disagree about the emerging picture of Basketweaver-Pueblo-Spanish cultural phases and persist in a diffusionist theory of prehistory emphasizing Austronesian migrations rather than Asiatic influences. He went on to write a synthesis of American Indian studies titled A History of the Ancient Southwest (1957), a straightforward survey of the ancient civilizations that were overrun by the Uto-Aztecan, Navajo and Apache intruders beginning about 1100.

Another bad boy of academia, Barry Fell, believed the Hohokam came from the Middle East and North Africa, where they had perfected adobe construction and canal irrigation of crops. Fell pointed to the parallels between Pima and Papago and Berber languages. 

The Salt and Gila Rivers ran year round when the Hohokam built their system of government and katchina-based religion. Some of the canals were 50 feet wide and 16 miles long. There were four or more networks of irrigation canals totaling more than a thousand miles long. Since they built grass huts and caliche-plastered mud mounds and villages, though, the footprint of the Hohokam today is mostly melted away by erosion, and their earliest habitation spots are forever lost in the changing shoreline. They used few timbers, so tree-ring chronologies cannot be applied to them.

Thus the Hohokam are likely to remain permanent mysteries to us. But a little hint:  if you read their name as Semitic, it means "Sea Peoples." Snaketown can be understood as "boat-town" as well as the modern local Indians' calque "place where there are lots of rattlesnakes."

Their genetic signature, at any event, seems to be haplogroup B, like the Maya, other Pueblo Indians and Southeast Asians.








  

 

"All the lights in the House of the High Priests of American Anthropology are out; all the doors and windows are shut and securely fastened (they do not sleep with their windows open for fear that a new idea might fly in); we have rung the bell of Reason, we have banged on the door with Logic, we have thrown the gravel of Evidence against their windows; but the only sign of life in the house is an occasional snore of Dogma. We are very much afraid that no one is going to come down and let us into the warm, musty halls where the venerable old ideas are nailed to the walls."

These biting words were penned by Harold Sterling Gladwin in Men out of Asia, the famous archeologist's most popular, non-technical work. Published in 1947, Gladwin's book presented a maverick view of the peopling of the Americas identifying five migrations of diverse races including Negrittoes and Austronesians to the New World. Heretically, he placed the first migration as early as 25,000 years ago and argued that the earliest colonists were Australoid. 

The reaction of his colleagues in the anthropological establishment was stony silence shading off into hrumps and pshaws of injured pride, for Gladwin illustrated Men out of Asia with campy cartoons by Campbell Grant making fun of the sacred keepers of knowledge at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, Carnegie Foundation and Smithsonian Institution. In one, the dean of Southwest and Maya archeology Alfred V. Kidder is depicted as Dr. Phuddy Duddy sitting in academic robes atop a whistle sounding the alarm of illogical chronology. In another, a bespectacled Gladwin and his tweedy friend Professor Earnest Hooton of Harvard are shown in the academic doghouse "by request." 

The Establishment is still uncomfortable about Gladwin, who died in 1983 after a distinguished career of more than 60 years. Although willing to praise his meticulous fieldwork on the Hohokam at Snaketown and exacting methodologies developed at the research center he founded at Gila Pueblo outside Globe, Arizona, they do not know quite what to say about his conclusions and hypotheses, which grew more adamant toward the end.  

The destroying angel of unorthodox theories, Stephen Williams of the Peabody Museum, can only think that Gladwin succumbed to his "whimsies" and grew soft-headed in his old age. "I have always regarded Men Out of Asia," Williams writes in Fantastic Archeology (p. 229), "as a sort of 'hyper-diffusionist' spoof."

We wonder whether the laddies in Harvard Yard and Castle on the Mall do not protest too much.

In a similar high-toned snipe, Williams dismisses the author of Pale Ink with its discussions of ancient records of Chinese explorations in America as "a sweet old lady (p. 185)."  Louis Leakey, who believed on the basis of the Calico Early Man excavations he organized in California that humans occupied North America as long ago as 400,000 years, comes in for like treatment. Williams implies that Leakey was senile and hurried in his judgment (p. 303). 

If a controversial interpretation of the archeological record cannot be debunked as lacking "soil truth" or the hard-won verities of the dig and thus being nothing but "armchair archeology," then one must resort to that time-honored device of the Ivy League sneer. For instance, Jeffrey Goodman's controversial American Genesis "mimics a scientific book very well" (p. 303), but it cannot possibly be taken seriously because, well, you know, no person in his right mind subscribes to a North American or Asian origin for humans! In addition to coming from a homely, unpatrician Western background, Goodman was also part Native American, which helped make him a pariah. 

But to the happily hidebound Dr. Phuddy Duddys, we say in the words of Blake:

Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;

Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain.

You throw the sand against the wind,

And the wind blows it back again.  

The winds of change may have the last laugh.

I got a holiday present from my wife of an unusual little book titled On the Trail of Spider Woman. Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Myths of the Southwest, by Carol Patterson-Rudolph (Santa Fe:  Ancient City Press, 1997). Putting this intriguing study together with a travel book by David Hatcher Childress, my son and I took a 4-day road trip into the homeland of the Indians credited with having the first civilization in the Southwest, a settled town life marked by desert agriculture, canals, pottery, baskets, ballcourts, plazas and adobe pueblos, pithouses and kivas. Previous occupants of the area were non-sedentary hunter-gatherers considered to be "paleo-Indians."

We visited Painted Rock Petroglyph Site outside Gila Bend, in the middle of nowhere, and ended the trip in the barren sands outside Phoenix, where we began it, visiting the Hohokam Pima National Archeological Monument, also known as Snaketown. The former is little seen, and the latter cannot seen, because the Pima (now Gila River Indians) had the ballcourt and other ruins reburied by backhoes in the 1970s. The caretakers of this declared national treasure decided not to open it to anyone to view or visit because of its "sensitive" nature. There are no signs, no roads, nothing left above ground.

Overview of pecked records and markings of Hohokam, 200 B.C.-A.D. 1300, on granite outcropping called Painted Rock in South Central Arizona.

At Painted Rock, the first mystery we pondered was why it was called "painted" rock when there is no paint. Petroglyphs are produced by pecking away the dark desert varnish to make a negative image on the underlying lighter rock. We wondered if it had anything to do with the Paint People, or Phoenicians, Kanawah Indians of the East Coast or Cherokee and Saponi Paint Clans.

The second mystery was the abundance of snake imagery. Famously, snakes in Indian tradition stand for boats and water. We noticed a Corn Cross, the symbol of the Feathered Serpent or Quetzlcoatl religion, supposedly introduced into Mexico from both the East and the West by white, bearded strangers in ships, who brought rule by laws and numerous arts of civilization and banned human sacrifice.

The third thing we remarked upon were the many Great Goddess or Earth Mother or birthing/fertility symbols. Such places were probably shrines where women came to be blessed and get married and give birth. Sun Park in Hopiland has numerous hemispherical carvings about two inches wide where people ground out minerals to eat. These cupmarks or cupoles at petroglyph sites puzzled archeologists until an important article in a scholarly journal clarified their meaning as part of the worldwide phenomenon of pica (pronounced "pie-ka"), "the desire to ingest nonfood substances such as rock powder, clay, chalk, dirt, and other material by some humans, especially pregnant women" (Kevin L. Callahan, "Pica, Geophagy, and Rock-Art in the Eastern United States," in The Rock-Art of Eastern North America, ed. Carol Diaz-Granados and James R. Duncan, Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2004, p. 65.

Neolithic Cupmarks in Kh. Umm El-Umdan, Israel. 

In general, petroglyphs are ignored both by archeology and anthropology, and their study is a no man's land. Sun Park has a birthing cave and birthing stone. Canyon de Chelly has the most photographed Mother Earth rock formation in the world, Spider Rock, a chthonic monument discussed on page 83 of the Spider Woman book by Patterson-Rudolph.

Who Were the Hohokam?

There were also clear images of horses, riders, people praying, spirals, axis mundi (center of the earth) symbols like the iron butterfly and cross, labyrinths, bilobed axes, irrigation plans, horned beasts, felines, palaces or villages and warriors with spears and shields. We searched in vain for anomalous depictions of whales, elephants and deep water fish, found at other similar sites, but the sun was sinking and we did not have time to make a thorough inspection of the motifs. There is a famous petroglyph of a whale at Old Oraibi.

The name Ho-ho-kam is usually explained as meaning "Those Who Are Departed," but such an etymology is more a gloss than a literal translation of its meaning and origin. Like many words in the Hopi, Zuni, Pima and Azteco-Utan languages in general it is composed of South Semitic elements. In Egyptian, it literally means "Sea Peoples" or "Foreigners." The historic Sea Peoples came from Asia Minor and once threatened to conquer the Egyptian empire. The Philistines and Phoenicians are related to them. They were remarkable for their feather bonnets and, like their relatives the Cretans (whose language also came from Asia Minor), for a long-protracted continuance of Mother Goddess worship down into the Bronze Age.

Haplogroup B is the signature lineage of certain Indians in North America. Its ultimate source is Southeast Asia (not Mongolia, as has been suggested for the other three classic Native American haplogroups A, C and D), whence it took multiple circum- or trans-Pacific migratory routes to the Americas (Eschleman et al. 2004). It has high frequencies in Polynesia, which was settled from Southeast Asia, and among the Western Indians of the U.S. such as the Hopi, Zuni (77%), Anasazi (78%), Yuman, and Jemez Pueblo (89%). It is also found in frequencies approaching 70% in the Cherokee and Chickasaw.

We believe Spider Woman is simply an aspect of the Stone Age Great Goddess worshiped by those who came from Southeast Asia through Polynesia and helped colonized the American Southwest. She is the same as the Earth Mother. As in other cultures, she was replaced by sky and sun deities and male hierarchies. But her religion seems to have persisted in the Hohokam, Cherokee and Hopi tribes in a similar fashion to the survival of her cult in the Cretans, Phoenicians and Sea Peoples. 

According to Hopi and other traditions, at the end of the last age, the Mother Goddess ceased to be the leader of the people in their wanderings and went back "under the sea" to the east and west whence she and they had emerged. We can only infer from this that Spider Woman, as she was called in Asia and the Pacific, and the Great Goddess, as she was known in the Old World of the Middle East, relinquished her role as supreme deity to the new male pantheons and withdrew across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to the distant origins of civilization outside the Americas. Ironically, her memory survived better among the Indian nations than in the war-torn empires and materialistic cultures that dominate world history elsewhere. Indian societies today exhibit rare examples of matriarchy as opposed to patriarchy.