394 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



Bovee, and I counted the stone foundations of 28 houses m an area 

 of 8 acres, while we found pottery quite thickly strewn over 40 acres. 

 We doubtless missed some of the houses, either because their founda- 

 tions have been concealed by the washing of gravel in floods, or be- 

 cause their appearance is insignificant. Hence we seem to be well 

 within the limit if we say that the population of the village in its 

 prime was probably as much as 120, whereas now the available water 

 supply is sufficient for little more than one-tenth as many. I am 

 well aware that the common objection to this conclusion is that the 

 ancient Americans did not occupy all the houses of a village at once; 

 that people built houses, and then if some one died they built others; 

 and thus there might be many times as large a number of houses as 

 there were families. This view, however, is unproved. Its basis, is 

 first, the fact that certain modern tribes of Indians, few in number, 

 and living largely in huts of temporary and easily constructed char- 

 acter, have the habit here described; and, second, the unfounded 

 assumption that the population of the southwest in ancient, prehis- 

 toric times can not possibly have been so large as the ruins would seem 

 to indicate, because the country can not now support so many people. 

 In reply to this it may be said, first, that we have no knowledge of 

 the customs of the Hohokam apart from what we learn from their 

 ruins, nor do we even know that they were related to the modern 

 Indians any more closely than we are supposed to be to our fellow 

 Indo-Europeans, the Persians. In the second place, the habit of 

 abandoning dwellings after some one has died in them is not at all 

 common at the present time, and it rarely or possibly never prevails 

 among a purely sedentary, agricultural people such as the Hohokam 

 appear to have been. It is practically limited to tribes who wander 

 from place to place and whose habitations are consequently of the 

 nature of booths or mere temporary shelters, easily removed and 

 easily renewed. In the third place, the size of the central structure 

 of each ruined village, the supposed ceremonial chamber, is suffi- 

 cient to indicate a considerable number of people. The stone founda- 

 tions of the structm-e at Gibbon's ranch, for example, have a length 

 of 105 feet, and it hardly seems probable that a mere handful of 

 Hohokam, 10 to 20 in number, including women and children, would 

 have built so large a building. Finally, it is unscientific to assume 

 that conditions of climate have always been as they are to-day. It 

 may be that those who hold this view are right, but they certainly 

 are not justffied in making the assumption when the matter has 

 never yet been submitted to any rigorous mathematical investiga- 

 tion such as is here attempted. 



After studying the ruins of the main Santa Cruz Valley I came to the 

 conclusion that a mere examination of the map was sufficient to 



