Qualla: Hohokam Pima National Monument

Hohokam Pima National Monument: Introduction

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steve Schmorleitz, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1867, a retired soldier named Jack Swilling looked at the remains of ancient canals cutting through the Arizona desert and saw opportunity. He founded the Swilling Irrigating and Canal Company directly atop those thousand-year-old waterways, and when a settlement grew around his enterprise, someone suggested naming it Phoenix, after the mythical bird reborn from ashes. The ashes in question belonged to the Hohokam, whose village of Snaketown once held up to 3,000 people. Their name, in the O'odham language, means those who have gone. Where they went, and why they burned their own city around 1100 CE, remains one of the great mysteries of the American Southwest.

Image: Steve Schmorleitz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hohokam Pima National Monument: Masters of the Desert

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathunder, Public domain. The Hohokam should not have been able to farm here. The soil was sandy and dry, the volcanic mountains rugged, the rivers slow. Yet for more than a millennium, they grew beans, squash, tobacco, cotton, and corn in the inhospitable landscape. Their secret was engineering. Using wo...

Image: Jonathunder | Public domain

Hohokam Pima National Monument: The Oval Mysteries

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BruceandLetty, CC BY 2.0. Archaeologists who first excavated Snaketown identified large oval-shaped fields as ballcourts, similar to those found throughout Mesoamerica. Each was roughly the size of a football field with raised embankments. But in 2009, researchers proposed a different explanation. The une...

Image: BruceandLetty | CC BY 2.0

Hohokam Pima National Monument: The Burning

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit BruceandLetty, CC BY 2.0. Something happened around 1100 CE. The archaeological record shows many buildings burned simultaneously, not the gradual decay of abandonment but the violent destruction of a functioning community. Then nothing. The site was never reoccupied. Archaeologist Emil Haury, who excavat...

Image: BruceandLetty | CC BY 2.0

Hohokam Pima National Monument: Sacred Ground

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cathy Cline, CC BY-SA 3.0. Snaketown, an O'odham word meaning place of snakes, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. Artifacts recovered from the site now reside at the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument museum in Coolidge, Arizona, and the Huhugam Heritage Center offers exhibits on tribal ...

Image: Cathy Cline | CC BY-SA 3.0