Between Desert and River

Hohokam Settlement and Land Uss in the Los Robles Community

by

Christian E. Downum

This report presents both a piece of the regional Hohokam puzzle and an initial account of some of the details of Hohokam existence in an area intermediate between two major perennial streams (the middle Santa Cruz and Gila rivers).  Based largely on a recent  U.S. Bureau of Reclamation – sponsored survey and the Cerro Prieto mapping project, this volume describes Hohokam, protohistoric Piman, and recent settlement patterns and land use across a broad portion of the Los Robles Wash area in the lower Santa Cruz River Basin.  Much of the work is devoted to an extensive set of Hohokam sites, and in particular the trincheras site of Cerro Prieto, that appears to have been integrated into a coherent community of interacting and apparently cooperative and politically unified settlements.  Like a previous publication in this series on the Marana Community by Suzanne Fish, Paul Fish, and John Madsen (1992), this report provides an initial portrait of a large, nonriverine Hohokam community in a so-called peripheral area.  Far from being marginal or irrelevant to the overall course of Hohokam cultural developments, such communities now seem to have forged significant links in a system of regional interaction stretching from the Phoenix Basin southward to the Sonoran Papagueria. As such, they must be regarded as integral parts of the Hohokam regional system, and they illustrate the cultural and behavioral variability encompassed by that system.