Hohokam

The Hohokam were a farming culture of the North American Southwest, centred on the Gila and lower Salt River drainages of the Phoenix basin in present-day south-central Arizona, with peripheries reaching the Tucson basin, the Mogollon Rim and northern Sonora. Flourishing roughly between 300 and 1500 CE, they built the most complex irrigation network of the pre-contact Western Hemisphere, watering cotton, maize, beans, squash and agave across the Sonoran Desert. Their towns, such as Snaketown with its ballcourts, plazas and craft markets, sat on trade routes stretching from the Pacific coast to the Great Plains and into Mexico, bringing turquoise, Gulf shells, macaws and copper bells. Cremation was their defining burial rite, and red-on-buff pottery their hallmark craft. After 1350 repeated Salt River floods wrecked canal heads that could not be rebuilt, great towns emptied, and the population dispersed into smaller groups. Oral tradition holds the Hohokam to be ancestors of the historic Akimel and Tohono O'odham peoples. Portions of their Phoenix canals were later renovated and still supply the city's water.