Hohokam

The Hohokam were desert farmers of the Phoenix basin, Arizona, their villages lining the Gila and lower Salt rivers from about 300 to 1450. Their hallmark was irrigation: with stone and wooden tools they dug hundreds of miles of canals with weirs, the most elaborate pre-contact water network, by 1300 supporting the largest population in the Southwest.

They grew maize, beans and cotton, built ballcourts by 600 and platform mounds by 1200, and traded at Snaketown; by the fourteenth century their settlements raised four-storey adobe great houses such as Casa Grande.

Floods after 1350 deepened the Salt River bed and wrecked canal heads; the large villages were abandoned and their people dispersed. The tradition ended around 1450, and oral history remembers them as ancestors of the Akimel and Tohono O'odham. The name is an O'odham word used by archaeologists for these remains.