Migrants and Mounds in the Northern San Pedro Valley, Arizona, 1200–1450 CE
During the late 1200s, a small group of Ancestral Pueblo immigrants from northeastern Arizona resettled in the northern San Pedro Valley in southeastern Arizona, maintaining their identity and lifeways. In response, local groups in the region built walled compounds and platform mounds that may have served as territorial markers. After a generation of heightened tensions, immigrants and locals ultimately developed an inclusive religion archaeologists call “Salado” that was expressed on intricately decorated ceramics. Over time the distinction between migrant and local became increasingly blurred. This religion facilitated the development of new social and trade networks that stretched across southern and central Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.
Arizona’s Safford Basin, an Ancient Cultural Crossroads
From an archaeological perspective, the Safford Basin in southeastern Arizona is one of the most poorly documented regions in the southern US Southwest. Many pre-contact Indigenous settlements were built on or plowed under before they were adequately studied. Still, the tidbits of information we have pieced together provide a tantalizing glimpse into a cosmopolitan center during the late pre-contact era that was only surpassed by the Phoenix Basin. During this time, Safford was a cultural crossroads for groups from across much of the US Southwest, including the Hohokam, Mogollon, and Ancestral Pueblo regions. The close interaction among these diverse groups led to new cultural, religious, and technological developments.
Arizona’s Tonto Basin, the Edge of the Hohokam World
The Tonto Basin in east central Arizona is one of the most intensively studied regions in the US Southwest. Centered on what is now Roosevelt Lake and surrounded by mountain ranges, the Basin lies at the northeastern edge of the Sonoran Desert that defines the Hohokam World. The region was studied intensively during the 1930s by Gila Pueblo and more recently by several large cultural resource management projects. From this work, we can trace the shifting connections and identities of the local inhabitants for more than a millennium (100–1450 CE) from Mogollon to Hohokam to Salado. Some of these shifts can be attributed to migration; others reflect the rise and fall of regional ideologies centered on the Phoenix Basin and Chaco Canyon with little change in the local population. The Tonto Basin can be considered a bellwether for larger trends taking place across the Southwest.