The pottery was red-on-buff, and Hohokam homes were brush-covered, single-room structures erected over slightly sunken floors (Fig. “Hohokam” is a Piman word meaning “those who have gone.” The Hohokam had neither black-on-white pottery nor stone masonry. The second member of the trio, Hohokam, was located in the deserts of southern Arizona. Together, black-onwhite pottery and stone masonry constitute the archaeological calling card of the Anasazi. (I use the term “pinyon-juniper” for the mosaic of piny-onjuniper forests, grasslands, and the occasional pine forest that characterize the Anasazi world.) As ubiquitous as the small houses were gray clay pots, often slipped white and painted with black decoration. The combination of a small masonry structure and a kiva represents the Anazazi home of the 12th century-the “unit pueblo” in which the Anasazi lived over most of the pinyon and juniper country of the Colorado Plateau. When excavated, the mound and the depression become a six-to-ten room masonry structure and a round subterranean room called a “kiva,” after the modern Pueblo ceremonial structure (Fig. The typical Anasazi ruin of this period is much smaller: low stone mounds, perhaps 3 by 10 meters, often next to a shallow bowl-shaped depression, usually between 4 and 5 meters in diameter. But big buildings like these were actually rare in the 11th and 12th centuries. 1), Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde, and dozens of other large National Park Service ruins that show up in photo essays, calendars, and postcards. The most familiar Anasazi sites are the largest: Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon (Fig. “Anazazi” has been variously translated from Navajo into English, but the gist is “ancient people who were not Navajo.” We call these ruins “Anazazi,” a term borrowed from Navajo people, who live today where Pueblo peoples lived a thousand years ago. The ruins of the Four Corners area (the Colorado Plateau) were once inhabited by the ancestors of the modern Pueblo peoples. To explain this contradictory statement, we must look at Anazazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon as we understand them today, not as interacting cultures or peoples, but rather as archaeological patterns that reflect different social and material adaptations to different environmental settings. In fact, this assumption has become so entrenched that there is no easy way to speak of these prehistoric inhabitants except as “the Anasazi.” “the Hohokam” or “the Mogollon.” But things may not he that simple-or, more accurately, they may not be that complex. Anazazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon have acquired a reality of their own: they are presumed to represent cultures or peoples whose social, political, or economic interactions we then study (see Fig. These terms have passed down from professor to student for at least three academic generations, and over that time they have evolved from jargon into Truth. 2): Anasazi (on the Colorado Plateau), Hohokam (in the deserts of southern Arizona), and Mogollon (between Anasazi and Hohokam, in the uplands and deserts south of the Colorado Plateau).

Caesar’s Gaul, the Southwest of the 11th and 12th centuries was divided into three parts (Fig.

Hohokam arrowheads