he Mogollon culture built larger semisubterranean structures which probably served as community ceremonial structures, or kivas. With roughly circular or D-shaped floor plans, the kivas, with ramped or stepped entrances, usually faced easterly. Perhaps all contained articles of ritual, for instance, clay effigies of humans or animals, prayer sticks of shamans, the claws of powerful animals, stone pipes for wild tobacco, colored mineral ingredients for body paints, crystals of quartz, and stones with exotic shapes. Most had central fire hearths. Some had interior storage pits. A few had parallel floor grooves, apparently formed by logs which might have provided mooring for tautly stretched animal hide foot drums.
Like the Mogollon to the east, the Hohokam occupied a geologically and ecologically diverse region. At its maximum, their range extended from the basin and range and the low desert country of northern Sonora and southern Arizona northward up the famed Mogollon Rim escarpment and onto the Colorado Plateau’s southwestern edge.
Between A. D. 1400 and 1450, the Hohokam, like puebloan peoples across the Southwest and northern Mexico, abandoned their communities. Some apparently dispersed into neighboring regions, perhaps to surviving or to newly founded pueblos. Stragglers may have remained behind, diminished in material wealth, technology and artisanship, but giving rise to the Pima and Papago peoples who greeted the Spanish entradas into southern Arizona in the sixteenth century.
