David R. Wilcox
Museum of Northern Arizona
Tepimans and Hohokam Migration: Is There a Connection?
The recent construction of the Coalescent Community Database of all known sites with 13 or more rooms for the whole North American Southwest during the period A.D. 1200 to 1700 opens up many new avenues for understanding the dynamic processes of migration by Southwestern peoples. These data show that the largest concentration of population in the whole Southwest from A. D. 1200 to 1380 was in the Phoenix Basin where Hohokam populations lived in large villages and farmed using large irrigation systems. Massive flooding along the Salt River in the 1380s after which it is thought they were not able to reconnect the canal heads may have necessitated long-distance migration of these Tepiman speakers into central Sonora where they joined or initiated the large irrigation villages of Pima Bajo groups reported by the Spaniards in the middle 1500s. No archaeological signatures for these putative Pima Bajo villages, or those of their Opata neighbors, are known, posing a highly significant archaeological problem that cries out for new research.
