Late in the Hohokam Chronological Sequence, they also used extensive dry-farming systems, primarily to grow agave for food and fiber. Over 70 years of archaeological research has revealed that the Hohokam cultivated varieties of cotton, tobacco, maize, beans and squash, as well as harvested a vast assortment of wild plants. These were constructed using relatively simple excavation tools, without the benefit of advanced engineering technologies, and achieved drops of a few feet per mile, balancing erosion and siltation. Since the 9th century and extending into the 15th century, they maintained what was to become extensive irrigation networks that rivaled the complexity of those used in the ancient Near East, Egypt, and China. The Hohokam used the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers and constructed an assortment of simple canals combined with weirs in their various agricultural pursuits. This prehistoric group from the Early Agricultural Period grew corn, lived year round in sedentary villages and developed sophisticated irrigation canals. Archaeologists working at a major archaeological dig in the 1990s in the Tucson Basin, along the Santa Cruz River, identified a culture and people that were ancestors of the Hohokam that might have occupied southern Arizona as early as 2000 BCE. In North America, the Hohokam were the only culture to rely on irrigation canals to water their crops since as early as 800, and their irrigation systems supported the largest population in the Southwest by 1300. Within a larger context, the Hohokam culture area inhabited a central trade position between the Patayan Culture, situated along the Lower Colorado River and in southern California the Trincheras Culture of Sonora, Mexico the Mogollon Culture located in eastern Arizona, southwest New Mexico, and northwest Chihuahua, Mexico as well as the Ancestral Puebloan Culture in northern Arizona, northern New Mexico, southwest Colorado, and southern Utah.

The Hohokam also extended into the Mogollon Rim region. Collectively, the Core and Peripheries formed what is referred to as the hohokam regional system, which occupied the northern or Upper Sonoran Desert in what is now Arizona. This is referred to as the Hohokam Core Area, as opposed to the Hohokam Peripheries or adjacent regions into which the Hohokam Culture extended. As an abstract construct, this culture was centered on the middle Gila River and lower Salt River drainages, in what is known as the Phoenix basin. The term Hohokam, borrowed from the Akimel O'odham, is used to define an archaeological culture that existed from the beginning of the common era to about the middle of the 15th century. Map of Hohokam and neighboring cultures, ca. Recent academic research focused on the Sobaipuri, ancient ancestors of the modern Pima, indicates that Pima groups were present in the region at the end of the Hohokam sequence. ДЄccording to local oral tradition, the Hohokam may be the ancestors of the historic Akimel O'odham and Tohono O'odham peoples in Southern Arizona.

National Park Service Website, Hohokam is a Pima (O'odham) word used by archaeologists to identify a group of people who lived in the Sonoran Desert of North America. Gladwin, who applied the existing O'odham term for the culture, huhu-kam, meaning 'all used up,' to classify the remains he was excavating in the Lower Gila Valley. The Hohokam culture was differentiated from others in the region in the 1930s by archaeologist Harold S. Variant spellings in current, official usage include Hobokam, Huhugam and Huhukam. Considered part of the Oasisamerica tradition, the Mogollon established significant trading centers such as at Snaketown and are considered to be the builders of the original canal system around the Phoenix metropolitan area, which the Mormon pioneers rebuilt when they settled the Lehi area of Mesa near Red Mountain. The Hohokam Peoples are one of the four major archaeological prehistoric Southwestern cultural divisions of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. The Hohokam ( / h oКЉ h oКЉ Л€ k Й‘Лђ m/) were an ancient Native American culture centered on the present-day US state of Arizona. The Great House at the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument.

Hohokam pottery designs