HOHOKAM PETROGLYPHS

A DANGEROUS HUG!

One of the really interesting locales in south-central Arizona is Casa Grande Ruins National Monument near Coolidge (about one-half way between Tucson and Phoenix).  The site was given the designation of archaeological reserve by President Benjamin Harrison in 1892 (the first such designation).  In 1918 President Woodrow Wilson declared the site a National Monument.  The National Park Service (NPS) refers to the inhabitants and builders as Ancient Sonoran Desert People but most people simply call them the Hohokam.  They evidently were agrarian people and farmed the desert with the help of an extensive system of canals, mostly along the Gila and Salt Rivers.   The NPS believes the Hohokam lived in the area for over a thousand years until around 1450.  At Casa Grande the people built a "big house” (Spanish = casa grande) that the NPS believes is one of the largest prehistoric structures ever built in North America; remains of the four story “house” are still visible today.

While hiking with, and following, my brother in the hills south of Casa Grande (I was actually looking for zeolites in the basalt) we were treated to the sight of hundreds of Hohokam petroglyphs, and foundations of some sort of ?buildings.  While the buildings at Casa Grande are composed of caliche, all we observed were rock foundations.

 

I have observed numerous petroglyphs (“pecked” into rocks) and pictographs (painted on the rocks) in the red rocks of the Colorado Plateau, and even in my native Kansas on the Dakota Sandstone.  The Colorado Plateau glyphs and graphs are the work of artists associated with the Barrier Canyon Culture and the later and better known Fremont Culture.  However, this is the first time that I have observed glyphs on basalt boulders.  But, I guess artists work with the media available!

mike

A BUILDING FOUNDATION?

LIZARD GLYPH

A STORY WITH A LIZARD

BIGHORN SHEEP