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Museum peeks into the lost Hohokam culture
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ANCIENT HARDBALL: Artifacts at Phoenix’s Pueblo Grande Museum include this ball, used by Hohokam athletes to play an ancient hybrid of basketball and hockey. At bottom is an excavated stadium where the game was played.
Tim Hacker, Tribune
Tim Hacker, Tribune
Stare into a pit house at Pueblo Grande Museum, and you'll get a taste of the Hohokam people and their hardscrabble lives. Look around the ruins and you can almost see it one millennia earlier: Women grinding corn under wood arbors; men scratching canals from the banks of the rolling Salt River - then a Southwest 727 lumbers across your sightline and you remember you're in east Phoenix.
"We get a lot of school tours," Pueblo Grande's Stacey Mays chuckles. "One of the most frequent questions the kids ask is: Why did (the Hohokam) build their village so close to the airport?"
But the Hohokam predated the airport, and human flight, and the "discovery" of the New World. They tamed the Sonoran Desert by carving miles of narrow canals and letting small communities blossom at the end of each one. Their culture was trimmed in decorative pots and intricate jewelry; they played tribal sports and built trade networks reaching into Mexico. The canals they left behind stood as a survival blueprint for the Mormon settlers and every culture that followed. And their traces can still be seen in the carefully cut hive of rooms atop Pueblo Grande's mound platform.
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The 79-year-old museum actually tells two stories: the Hohokam's and the saga of archaeology, which is how we know about them.
"We don't dwell as heavily on the cultural aspects of the Hohokams as, say, the Hoo-hoogam Ki Museum in Scottsdale," says Mays. "We're more about the sociological side, and the science of discovering, understanding and preserving ancient cultures." Pueblo Grande Museum tells both stories well, and families looking for an inexpensive, thought-provoking adventure might want to linger at the corner of Washington and 44th streets and learn what secrets lie beneath those landing planes.
Pueblo Grande Museum is at 4619 E. Washington St., Phoenix. Summer hours are 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Tickets are $5 for adults, $4 for senior citizens and $3 for kids 6-17. Children younger than 6 are free. For more information, call (602) 495-0901 of visit www.pueblogrande.com.
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