Week 34: Snaketown

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More than 2,000 years ago, a group of native peoples we know today as Hohokam settled along the Salt and Gila Rivers.  They built a vast network of canals and developed an extensive irrigated empire in the desert.  By about 1450, the Hohokam had seemingly disappeared, leaving behind innumerable artifacts, canals, and structures to tell of their civilization.

For decades, Anglo desert farmers had been discovering broken pot sherds and stone tools in their fields.  Despite this, not much was known of Hohokam culture until 1934, when a former New York stock broker and a young archaeologist undertook the excavation of a site known as Snaketown.

Harold Gladwin, a successful stock broker, sold his seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1922.  He moved west, first to California where he worked in the natural history museum in Santa Barbara, then to Arizona, where he worked on excavations of the Casa Grande ruins in Coolidge.  This work peaked his interest in the Hohokam, and he organized the Gila Pueblo Foundation to fund archaeological work across the Southwest.  To aid in this work, he hired Emil Haury, a 1928 graduate of the archaeology school at the University of Arizona.  Together they would embark on one of the most important archaeological digs in the desert Southwest.

Snaketown was one of the largest Hohokam settlements.  Situated just north of the Gila River, its location is not far from the present day borders of Chandler on the Gila River Indian Community.  Though designated as a national monument, Snaketown is not open to the public.  Gladwin and Haury began excavations of the site in 1934.  Their main goal was to establish a chronology of the Hohokam civilization.  As a result of their dig, they established that Snaketown was inhabited from about 300 BCE to 1100 CE.  It was home to anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 people at its peak.  Though Snaketown itself is only about 250 acres, the massive canal system they excavated led them to believe that thousands of acres surrounding the community were irrigated.

One important find for Gladwin and Haury were oblong depressions with flat bottoms and dirt walls.  They concluded that these depressions were ball courts, similar to the ball courts of central Mexico, though it is unclear just what the game played in them was like.  Regardless, the ball courts served as gathering places for the Hohokam and surrounding peoples.  Ideas, food, and goods were exchanged during the festivities at the ball courts. 

One of the more interesting finds during their excavation was the discovery of pyrite, or fool’s gold, mirrors buried with some human remains.  Gladwin and Haury were unsure what to make of these mirrors.  A 2014 study found that the pyrite that Gladwin and Haury found at Snaketown matches Mesoamerican pyrite mirrors, suggesting that the Hohokam had a wide trade network that reached deep into central Mexico.

Gladwin and Haury published their findings, which informed future archaeologists about the Hohokam people.  Not satisfied with their conclusions or those of other archaeologists, Haury went back to Snaketown in the mid-1960s and conducted new excavations.  His findings from the later dig allowed him to literally write the book on Hohokam culture and archaeology.

After Haury’s second excavation of Snaketown, the Gila River Indian Community had the site reburied.  The artifacts that were excavated in the 1930s and the 1960s were repatriated to the Gila River Indian Community in 2014.  While today the site has returned to the desert sands, thanks to the work of Gladwin and Haury the legacy of the Hohokam will not be forgotten.