Snaketown: The Hohokam City Beneath the Desert

About five miles from where you are, on land belonging to the Gila River Indian Community, there is a national monument that almost no one has ever visited. That is by design.

Snaketown, the Hohokam village preserved within the Hohokam Pima National Monument, takes its name from a Native word meaning place of the snakes. People lived here for more than a thousand years, from roughly three hundred BCE to eleven hundred CE, making it one of the longest-continuously-occupied settlements in the ancient Southwest. At its height the village may have held two thousand inhabitants, sustained by an irrigation system that moved water from the Gila River across miles of desert through a network of hand-dug canals.

Those canals are the Hohokam's most extraordinary achievement. Their canal system in the Salt and Gila River valleys eventually totaled more than five hundred miles of engineered waterways, allowing intensive agriculture in a landscape that receives less than eight inches of rain per year. The descendants of those canals are the irrigation channels that still run through the Phoenix metropolitan area today. When twentieth-century engineers began building modern irrigation infrastructure across the Salt River Valley, they found they were frequently following routes that the Hohokam had engineered one thousand years earlier.

The site was excavated by archaeologist Emil Haury in major campaigns in the nineteen thirties and nineteen sixties. Haury's work at Snaketown helped define the Hohokam as a distinct cultural tradition, separate from the Ancestral Puebloans to the north.

Congress designated the area a national monument in nineteen seventy-two. The Gila River Indian Community, whose O'odham members trace their ancestry to the Hohokam, chose not to open the site to public visitation. The monument remains off limits, protected on the ground by the community that considers it ancestral territory.