The Bearing of Ceramics on Developments in the Hohokam Classic Period

Abstract

The major local traits, which most clearly separate the Hohokam as a development unrelated to the Pueblo during this period of time, consist of jacal houses, loosely grouped in rancheria style villages; cremation of the dead; paddle-and-anvil pottery fired in an oxidizing atmosphere and decorated in red; ball courts; irrigation agriculture; highly developed work in shell; and ornately carved stone vessels. During the Classic period which followed, many new elements appeared, and it is with the two phases of this period, Soho (1150-1300 AD) and Civano (1300-1400 AD), that this paper is concerned. In 1928, Schmidt reported on stratigraphic tests he conducted in Hohokam trashmounds in the Salt River valley of southern Arizona. His tests revealed, in this valley where red-on-buff pottery and cremation had been the norm, that a polychrome pottery and extended burials appeared in the last phases of occupation. To account for their appearance he suggested the new traits may have resulted from an influx of another unrelated group of people.l In 1929, Gladwin developed Schmidt's idea further and suggested that the people of the Salado Branch, situated near Roosevelt Lake on the Salt River, were the bearers of these and other new cultural traits which he defined. He placed the time of their entry between 1300 and 1350 AD.2 In 1940, on the basis of the results of a stratigraphic survey in the Salt River valley, it was pointed out that the appearance of so-called Salado traits in the last phases of occupation, such as extended burials, redware, and caliche-walled structures, actually occurred as early as 1150 AD. These as well as other new 1 Schmidt, 1928, p. 281. 2 W. and H. S. Gladwin, 1929, pp. 37, 70-71. See also W. and H. S. Gladwin, 1933, p. 6; 1935, p. 254, and Haury, 1945, p. 208.