CLIMATE OF NORTH AMERICA HUNTINGTON. 385 



more well-to-do members of the community apparenth^ had more 

 pretentious houses, the remains of which are probably to be found in 

 the larger heaps of clay and rubble which occur in most villages. 

 Close to the mountains, or in regions where stone was available, other 

 methods of construction prevailed. There we find every type of 

 architecture, from houses which used stone only in a single course in 

 the bottom of the walls, to structures made entirely of roughly 

 squared stone blocks. Some of these stone structures were cliff 

 dwellings of three stories in front of caves, while others were isolated 

 buildings standing in the middle of a plain and still rising three or 

 four stories even after the lapse of one or two thousand years. 



The majority of the villages must have been inhabited for a long 

 time. Even where the houses have entirely disappeared, the amount 

 of broken pottery covering the ground indicates that a busy popula- 

 tion lived here for centuries. The modern Papago Indians still use 

 pottery to almost the same extent as before the coming of the 

 white man, yet the amount of broken pottery in their chief villages, 

 which have been inhabited at least 50 years, is insignificant, while 

 that in the ruins is as great as in many Asiatic ruins which are well 

 known to have been occupied hundreds of years. I emphasize this 

 point because American archeologists and ethnologists have labored 

 under a peculiar impression which amounts almost to an hallucination. 

 Being convinced that no change of climate has occurred, they have 

 been forced to the peculiar theory that the ancient people of America, 

 the "Hohokam" or "Perished ones," as the modern Pimas call 

 them, were of a different nature from the rest of mankind. It has 

 been supposed that these ancient Hohokam were extraordinarily 

 mobile and extraordinarily industrious. For instance, in the Thir- 

 teenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (p. 259), Minde- 

 leff, one of the best authorities, says that ''a band of 500 

 village-building Indians might leave the ruins of 50 villages in the 

 course of a single century." He assumes a degree of mobility unpar- 

 alleled among an}' modern agricultural people, or among any of whom 

 we have historic records. His assumption also carries with it the 

 corollary that the Hohokam must have spent most of their time in 

 building houses, or in making pottery with which to strew the ground 

 and give an appearance of age to their villages. Hunting tribes are, 

 of course, mobile in the highest degree, but the people with whom we 

 are dealing were strictly agricultm'al, as is universally agreed. The 

 ruins of their villages are invariably located close to agricultural land, 

 or at least to land which would be available for agriculture if there 

 were water enough; their number, even accordmg to those who hold 

 the migratory theory, was too great to allow of their obtaining a living 

 by hunting; they had no domestic animals on which to rely; and 

 finally, traces of corn and beans, the two staple products, are found in 



