The Iconography of Connectivity Between the Hohokam World and Its Southern Neighbors

Abstract

Archaeologists have long compared the Hohokam world of the North American Southwest to contemporary traditions in Mesoamerica and West Mexico. A degree of cultural connectivity between the Southwest and Mesoamerica is evident in similarities in public architecture, ceramic technology and design, ritual paraphernalia, and subsistence, among other qualities. Researchers commonly frame this connectivity in economic or cultural evolutionary terms that position Hohokam communities as somehow descendant from or dependent on more complexly and hierarchically organized societies far to the south. In this paper, I examine this connectivity through the lens of iconography to show that shared religious themes and archetypes were strands within the nexus. I focus on three iconographic subjects in Hohokam media—serpents, flowers, and “pipettes”—each of which materializes seemingly Mesoamerican religious concepts. From a careful consideration of the inception and breadth of each, I argue that Hohokam artisans began to portray these subjects in concert with a religious revitalization movement that drew a degree of inspiration from the south. However, while the iconography may have been new to Hohokam media, the religious themes were not. I show that the iconography references Archaic religious archetypes and cosmological principles that probably accompanied the spread of agriculture millennia before the formation of the Hohokam world. Rather than representing a new religion, I suggest Hohokam artisans materialized these long-established and unquestioned principles in novel iconographic ways as a means of naturalizing and ordaining the rapid social change that accompanied the religious revitalization movement.