Visit to Indian Sites

Skousen tribe in front of reconstructed dwelling

On New Year's Day we made a trip to two Indian Sites. The first one is called the Gatlin Site, a prehistoric Hohokan Indian Village located a few miles from Gila Bend. Probably first occupied sometime before 900 AD, the Gatlin Site contains one of the few documented Hohokam platform mounds. Associated with the mound are pit houses, ball courts, middens, and prehistoric canals. The mound is one of the only excavated and documented Sedentary Period platform mounds that is still relatively intact. The site has been designated as a Historic Landmark. The site is being developed, and they are in the process of building replicas of original houses. The village people dug a canal by hand from the Gila River to the village for their water supply. You can still see evidence of that.

Hand dug prehistoric canal

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After our visit to the Hohokan Village we went to the Painted Rock Petroglyph Site. It was an opportunity to view an ancient archaeological site containing hundreds of symbolic and artist petroglyphs. There are also inscriptions made by people who passed through during historic times. Many well-known events in Arizona history occurred near the Petroglyph Site, including the expedition of Juan Bautista de Anza that founded San Francisco, the Mormon Battalion, and the Butterfield Overland Mail.

The Western Archaic tradition is an earlier style attributed to a hunting and gathering culture that lived in this region between 7500 BC to about AD 1. These designs were made by artists who used stone tools to peck images into the rock surface.


The Gila Style is a later tradition attributed to the group of farmers that archaeologists call the Hohokam. They lived here between about 300 BC and 1450 AD.

Click on the small arrow




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And, of course, before going home we had to stop at Dairy Queen for some ice cream.

Emma and Shanna



So many choices!



Ellie

Emma likes sprinkles, too