The Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona contains thousands of archaeological sites associated with the Hohokam culture. The Hohokam made a distinctive buff-colored pottery painted with red designs, built large adobe structures called “platform mounds” and “big houses,” and constructed sophisticated canal systems that watered crops supporting one of the densest populations in the American Southwest.
The Sonoran Desert is also home to the O'odham (also known as the O'otham), Native Americans who were present when the earliest Euro-Americans explored the region in the 1500s. These explorers observed that the adobe buildings were in ruins, that most of the canals had been abandoned, and that the O'odham lived in small villages that represented a simpler lifestyle compared to the Hohokam.
Archaeologists have argued that the Hohokam, named after an O'odham word translated by some as “those who have perished,” underwent a major population decline in the 1400s that is often referred to as a “collapse.” Due in part to apparent differences in material culture between the Hohokam and the O'odham, anthropologists and archaeologists have questioned whether there is an ancestral connection between those people who lived in the past and the present-day O'odham. Possessed with a rich oral tradition and a strong sense of connection with the Sonoran landscape, the O'odham adamantly disagree with the notion that the Hohokam are not their ancestors.
J. Brett Hill's book is a comprehensive and nuanced examination of the complicated history of this controversy. He documents how diverse observers—soldiers, missionaries, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and journalists—have written about the Hohokam, shaping how O'odham heritage has been interpreted and how those interpretations have changed over time.
The O'odham are divided primarily into four groups, each with its own distinct homeland: the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, the Gila River Indian Community, the Ak-Chin Indian Community, and the Tohono O'odham Nation (formerly Papago). Hill examines how the present-day O'odham communicate their identity and relationships to others through popular media, including websites, museums, art, food, and events. Although unity of identity is evident, diversity is also represented. All four groups have museums that emphasize a common connection to place and to generations of descent.
The O'odham use the term “Huhugam” to refer to their ancestors. The word “Hohokam” was first used by ethnographer Frank Russell (The Pima Indians, 1908) for the ancient ruins he observed near the Pima (O'odham) villages he visited. “Hohokam” was not used by archaeologists until the 1930s, when the term was applied to the archaeological materials of the Sonoran Desert.
Hill points out that in Donald M. Bahr, Juan Smith, William Smith Allison, and Julian D. Hayden's book on O'odham oral traditions (The Short, Swift Time of Gods on Earth: The Hohokam Chronicles, 1994), their stories suggest that O'odham are a mixture of Huhugam and other people. This point is consistent with the more recent view of many archaeologists who interpret the Hohokam as a polythetic and multiethnic composite divided into distinctive subareas, with some groups having connections with groups elsewhere, including migrants from the Ancestral Pueblo areas of the northern Southwest.
Barnaby Lewis, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Gila River Indian Community, states that the word “Huhugam” refers to spirits of people, not objects, and that they are ancestral relatives of the present-day O'odham (Lewis and Rice, “Preface: On the Terms Huhugam and Hohokam” in Las Cremaciones: A Hohokam Ball Court Center in the Phoenix Basin, 2008). “Hohokam” is a term used by archaeologists for objects or things of the past associated with deceased O'odham. Therefore, it is different from “Huhugam.” Lewis considers “Hohokam” to be a valid term when used in the context of archaeological materials.
Hill documents how anthropologists and archaeologists have expressed a variety of opinions on the O'odham connections to the Hohokam. Arguments for a Hohokam “collapse,” mostly due to environmental degradation, are often related to abandonment of the region. Recent interpretations place less emphasis on collapse and abandonment, and they focus more on the concepts of survival and transformation as well as the anthropological theories of adaptation and resilience. In the afterword, David Martinez suggests that the Huhugam overtaxed their resources, which led to social strife and rebellion against their leaders, and then reinvented themselves with a lifestyle more in balance with the desert.
Martinez argues that the O'odham “have the right to determine the narrative on their ancestors and on their communal history” (p. 192). Fortunately, current O'odham culture preservation programs and recent collaborations between archaeologists and O'odham have benefited both the interests of archaeologists and the O'odham themselves. From Huhugam to Hohokam provides a valuable history of this relationship.
