The University of Arizona Press
February 20, 2025
In the new book The Hohokam and Their World: An Exploration of Art and Iconography, authors Linda M. Gregonis and Victoria Riley Evans offer readers the opportunity to explore how various images and objects may have been used by the Hohokam, and what the icons and objects may have meant, including how the Hohokam conveyed ideas about water, the Sonoran Desert, the ocean, travel, ancestors, and the cosmos. Today, the authors share photos of artifacts, places, and notes on how they researched this fascinating topic.
By Linda M. Gregonis and Victoria Riley Evans
We met at an artifact analysis class taught by Linda at Pima Community College Archaeology Centre, where we discovered a common interest in Hohokam pottery and a fascination with design. We started working together, analyzing pottery for a cultural resources management company in Tucson.
In the U.S. Southwest, pottery is used to determine cultural affiliation and time period because artists changed the designs through time. The examples with animals shown above date to the AD 700s and 800s; the examples with more abstract curves and zigzags date to the AD 600s.
One reason that pottery can be used to determine cultural affiliation is that the artists worked from a shared palette of symbols and design layouts. For Hohokam pottery, the layouts and symbols are similar across a large area, from Gila Bend east towards the Safford area and from south of Tucson to the Verde Valley.
As we analyzed pottery, we began to wonder what the symbols meant to the people who made the vessels and if and how the symbols were used across different artistic media, such as shell, stone, and rock imagery. We wondered how various images connected the Hohokam to groups in West Mexico and the U.S. Southwest and how those images fit in to Hohokam views of the world. So we decided to write a book.
We started our research by looking through the many site reports that have been written since the 1960s as a result of environmental laws that require archaeological work to be done prior to land development. We also visited museums and rock imagery sites, searching for objects and images that could give us a glimpse into the Hohokam world.
Victoria Evans taking snapshots at Picture Rocks and imagery from this site near Tucson.
Linda Gregonis looking at collections at the Amerind Foundation.
Along the way, we discovered numerous examples of particular images that were used in a variety of artistic media. We used those images—important, widespread cultural symbols—to suggest connections to a deep past in West Mexico and more recent connections to the O’odham and the Sonoran Desert. The connections and their possible meanings form the body of our book.
This image can be found on pottery, stone, and shell throughout the Hohokam region. Because of its resemblance, it has been interpreted as a “cipactli,” a mythical Mesoamerican beast. We think it may be a Hohokam interpretation of that beast, but that it is more likely a representation of a coyote or fox—both animals with “trickster” qualities. Coyotes are especially important in O’odham lore as one of the Creators. This pendant is made from a piece of shell.
This stone censor or bowl in the Amerind Foundation’s collection depicts stick figures with what appear to be tails carved around the entire surface. It is possible that this represents lizards transforming into humans. The ability to transform is a widely held belief among Indigenous people throughout the Americas.
On this piece of pottery, also from the Amerind Foundation, there is a bird, or perhaps a masked bird-human facing down into a bowl. Several other birds or bird-humans occur around the rim of the bowl, all with their heads pointing toward the center. The layout of the bowl is suggestive of a Mesoamerican voladores ritual where men dress as birds in directional colors (red for east, black for west, white for north, and yellow for south) and descend upside down on ropes from a symbolic world tree. For the Hohokam, this may have represented a transformative ritual (human-bird, bird-human) or was a symbolic way of connecting them to a West Mexican ritual.
Boulders at Painted Rocks, a rock imagery site west of Gila Bend. The lizards, bighorn sheep, snakes and other images are symbols that can be found on shell, pottery, and stone (as well as other rock imagery) throughout the Hohokam region. This site combines Hohokam and Patayan imagery. The Patayan were people who lived from the western Phoenix Basin west into California. There is evidence that Hohokam and Patayan people lived together in this western portion of the Hohokam region.
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Linda M. Gregonis is an independent researcher with a master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Arizona. She has spent more than forty years researching various aspects of Hohokam culture, including iconography, while working primarily as a ceramics analyst. Victoria R. Evans is an archaeologist who has conducted research in the Sonoran Desert for more than twenty years. Evans recently retired from New Mexico Highlands University, where she served as the anthropology laboratory director.
