Original Art Painting of a Hohokam Village showing early peoples Farming

This beautiful painting depicts a Hohokam Village showing early peoples farming in the Southwest US. The canvas board measures 16 inches in height and 20 inches in width, and it is a stunning example of realism style. The painting is an original production technique that utilizes oil painting to bring out the beautiful colors of the landscape and the Hohokam Peoples.The painting is unframed, and it would be a wonderful addition to any art collection. The theme of this painting is Native American, and it showcases the beauty and heritage of the Hohokam Peoples. This piece of art is perfect for anyone who loves art and history.

Hohokam villagers grew cotton and corn, as well as several types of beans and squash. In the Gila and Salt River valleys, the Indians built a complex system of canals, to lead water from the rivers to their fields above the floodplain.

In contrast, the Tucson Basin people practiced floodwater farming; that is, they planted crops in the floodplains of the rivers which flooded their banks after major storms.

The rivers at that time were shallow, meandering streams; they were not deeply entrenched as they are now. The Indians probably also dug short irrigation ditches, to direct water to crops grown on the floodplain.

In parts of the basin where floodplains were not available, the Hohokam farmed at the mouths of arroyos. They also built rock terraces and check dams on hill slopes and in washes to catch rainfall runoff.

The Indian's only agricultural tools were sharp, wooden digging sticks and handheld hoes made from thin rock slabs. They may also have used broken pieces of pottery as hand shovels.

Like other North American Indians, the Hohokam probably planted their crops in a series of small earth mounds. Corn, beans, squash, and cotton could all be planted in the same mound, so that each plant provided the others with nutrients and weed protection.

Planted in March after the last winter frost, crops were ready to be harvested in July. Villagers prepared much of their harvest for use during winter and spring.

Corn was a mainstay in the Hohokam diet. Although the Indians roasted and ate corn on the cob during harvest season, they dried and ground most of the corn into flour before use.

The word Hohokam is a Piman language term for “all used up” or “exhausted,” and the name given by archeologists to the ancient farming peoples of the southern deserts of Arizona.


The Hohokam were, in the words of archeologist Emil Haury, “masters of the desert.” Their cultural pattern existed from the first years A.D. through about A.D. 1450, barely 90 years before Spanish explorers arrived in the Southwest. During this time, they achieved remarkable successes. The Hohokam are probably most famous for their creation of extensive irrigation canals along the Salt and Gila rivers. In fact, the Hohokam had the largest and most complex irrigation systems of any culture in the New World north of Peru. Not even the complex societies in Mesoamerica had such extensive irrigation canals. Accompanying the canals were extensive villages that covered hundreds of acres and were occupied by several hundred people. Within the villages were monumental public works. Early in the Hohokam cultural sequence these consisted of ball courts and small, low, circular mounds made of earth. Later, the low circular mounds were replaced by much larger, rectangular “platform mounds” of earth, rock, and adobe covered with structures and courtyards built on top.

Hohokam villages are remarkable in the ancient Southwest for their stability. Unlike ancient pueblo towns, which often were abandoned after a few decades, some Hohokam villages were continuously occupied for up to 1,500 years or more. Hohokam villages also show that society was organized in a hierarchical fashion. The Hohokam represent one of the largest and most complex societies in the Southwest. At the cultural peak of the Hohokam in the “Classic” period of the A.D. 1100s through 1400s, there were tens of thousands of Hohokam people living in large villages scattered throughout the Phoenix and Tucson basins. Hohokam farmers truly had mastered the desert, in the sense that they were able to successfully grow crops in the same locations for hundreds of years and create a large, well-organized, prospering society.

Why this once-flourishing cultural pattern came to an end remains a mystery. Whatever the answer, however, people remained, descendants of whom include the Pima and Tohono O'odham of southern Arizona.

This is an artists interpretation of what a Hohokam community might have looked at based on historical evidence.