The Rock Art of Phoenix’s South Mountains—Preservation Fellow Research

Aaron Wright, Center Preservation Fellow and Washington State University Doctoral Candidate

Fellowship Research Goals

As a Center Fellow and a member of the South Mountain Rock Art Project (SMRAP), I am researching the place of South Mountain rock art within the Hohokam world, specifically the ways in which the production and use of petroglyphs were activities and experiences related to aspects of the Hohokam way of life and worldview. This research moves beyond considering petroglyphs solely as images by placing emphasis on meaningful social action. In turn, this research should shed light on the nature of Hohokam ritual and landscape interaction and the character of Hohokam religion.

The South Mountain Landscape

South Mountain Park, a large nature preserve on the southern edge of Phoenix, is best known as a recreational refuge from the hustle and bustle of modern life around the city. While hiking along the numerous trails within South Mountain Park, visitors commonly spot petroglyphs on boulders and outcrops. Archaeologists believe that most of these were produced by people living in the numerous Hohokam villages along the Salt and Gila rivers.

As a visual medium of expression, the petroglyphs provide a rare glimpse into how these early farmers perceived themselves and their world. In turn, it seems likely that the South Mountain landscape was one full of ritual and religious importance to the Hohokam. This importance has continued into the present, as South Mountain figures prominently into the sacred geographies of contemporary indigenous communities. For example, Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Peeposh (Maricopa) informants from the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) shared information with ethnographers Frank Russell and Leslie Spier about how South Mountain was visited during their dreams, in which they learned powerful songs. Perhaps this landscape held similar importance to the Hohokam.

Rock Art at South Mountain

South Mountain rock art has been a topic of archaeological interest since the late 1880s, when members of the Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition conducted the first professional excavations in the Phoenix Basin, including the site of Los Muertos, a large Hohokam village near present-day Chandler. During this foray, Frank Hamilton Cushing, the project’s director, took notes and made sketches of several petroglyph panels in the South Mountains. It wasn’t until the 1960s, however, when the first serious effort at documenting South Mountain petroglyphs was undertaken by Ernest Snyder, a chemistry professor at Arizona State University. And it was another 30 years until the next concerted study was launched, this time by City of Phoenix Archaeologist Todd Bostwick, who published some of his results in Landscape of the Spirits: Hohokam Rock Art at South Mountain Park (2002, University of Arizona Press). This pioneering research laid the groundwork for the South Mountain Rock Art Project (SMRAP), a collaborative research endeavor between the City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department, the Archaeological Research Institute of Arizona State University and the Center for Desert Archaeology.

Bostwick’s research raised two issues that would prove instrumental to goals of the SMRAP: 1) a thorough study of rock art in conjunction with its landscape contexts and a consideration of ethnography could yield highly productive and informative results, and 2) South Mountain petroglyphs are a fragile cultural resource that are being increasingly impacted by vandalism, theft and urban development. Realizing that the study and preservation of the South Mountain petroglyphs are important to both the public and archaeologists, the SMRAP is conducting an archaeological survey within the park intended to aid in developing a cultural resource management plan and nominating the park to the National Register of Historic Places.

The SMRAP’s research strategy is based largely on landscape archaeology. By being “grounded in place,” rock art is intimately related to the physical and social environments in which it was made and seen. Although the placement of rock art may appear random while on the ground, our efforts—aided by geographic information technologies—are revealing spatial patterns in the distribution of rock art and other archaeological materials across the landscape. One of the unique aspects of the South Mountain petroglyphs is that they are associated with a diverse array of archaeological features and artifacts. Ceramic and lithic artifacts dot the landscape, as does an assortment of features such as masonry structures, agriculture terraces, trails, resource-procurement areas and rockshelters. Although less prevalent, protohistoric and historical artifacts and features are also located within the 17,000-acre preserve. These associations of rock art with other archaeological traces are proving to be highly informative. For example, diagnostic artifacts such as decorated pottery add a temporal context not only to the rock art with which they are sometimes associated, but also to the use of the landscape in general. Moreover, these associations provide both social and behavioral contexts for the production and use of petroglyphs.