Archaeology in the Distribution Division of the Central Arizona Project: Thoughts on the History of the Hohokam Culture of Southern Arizona and on the Practice of Archaeology in the 1990s

Underwritten by the Bureau of Reclamation, Northland Research archaeologists surveyed more than 7,450 hectares (18,410 acres) of southern Arizona. Two hundred four archaeological sites were recorded. Some sites, but not many, were historic in age; a few were Archaic, from the era before ceramics and sedentary agriculture in the Southwestern lowlands. The majority were from the intervening Hohokam cultural sequence. We learned from these sites that the prehistory of southern Arizona is, at one and the same time, both more complicated but less complex than we had formerly imagined. Our work under the CAP Non-Indian Distribution Division contract focused primarily on an area of southern Arizona broadly known as the Santa Cruz Flats. We say broadly, because we use the "Flats" as a covering term for all of the plain that is south of the Gila River and north of the Tucson Basin and that is drained by the Santa Cruz River, and Greene, Santa Rosa, and Vekol washes. Within it, drainage patterns are indistinct, and were so even before a substantial part of the flats had been converted to agricultural land, due to the low gradient of the plain. The flats are intermediate between what have been traditionally considered the main foci of development for late prehistoric culture, the Salt/Gila River Valley and the Tucson Basin, and as such have not been studied nearly as much as the lands to the north and south. In this respect, the research history of the Flats mirrors its modem developmental history. The concentration of the Distribution Division effort on the Flats has given us a unique perspective from which to view on the prehistory of southern Arizona and our report here is primarily concerned with this viewpoint.