The part of being at Pueblo Grande that spoke to me was trying to extrapolate the images I saw in front of me of stone structures into dreams of hundreds of people living there. The foundation, paintings, and artifacts helped to inform those images dancing around in my head, but it is something that I know I will never have the full picture of. The Hokoham people lived lives that are completely different from any that we, as 21st-century U.S citizens, can truly grasp, as because they moved so often, they frequently had to turn something into nothing and create new structures and lives for themselves. I personally cannot imagine starting completely from square one in the middle of the desert, as these people so often did, which is in itself a reflection of how much we rely on the work our ancestors did. The conditions that we live in are the best in world history, even given the new challenges that have emerged, as our basic survival is rarely a question that comes to our minds. The fact that Hohokam adults spent most of their time building canals so that they would have access to water and structures for basic survival is something that I cannot conceive of for my life in the 21st-century. We are allowed and empowered to have hopes and greater aspirations for our lives that earlier people could not even conceive of, which is something that I am both amazed by and thankful for, even though we usually take it for granted in our day to day lives.
Land in O'odham Culture History and Economic Development
Great post, Tanner. Pueblo Grande is truly a though-provoking site. While I think you’re right that their lives were very different from ours, there were similarities too, don’t you think? We are essentially a culture that relies on intensive agriculture, labor specialization and extensive trading networks. However, I do realize that their ball game was probably nothing like baseball.
What struck me most about your post Tanner was your underlying appreciation of the great achievements of another culture about which we really know so very little. The Hohokam people, who are so separated from us by centuries of time, were able to live satisfying lives in ways so different from our own. We sense a common humanity with them, and can attribute motives to what we know of their behaviors, but there is much that is still a mystery about how they thought about the world, their interactions with their landscapes, and with other people.