1935 several prominent publications were started across the United States: american antiquity, the Journal of the Society for American Archaeology, and The Kiva. Casa Grande Compound A was excavated in the early 1900s by Jesse Walter Fewkes of the newly formed Bureau of American Ethnology. Organized archaeological research began in 1927 with harold s. gladwin’s expedition to Casa Grande to conduct stratigraphic excavation, which revealed evidence of two peoples and two potteries on the site. Gladwin founded the Gila Pueblo Archaeological Foundation, which is credited with consolidating the Hohokam research to a definite culture. In 1930 Emil W. Haury became Gladwin’s assistant director, and his subsequent report on the Snaketown site defined Hohokam culture.

The particular housing style of Casa Grande is distinctive for the Hohokam Classic period. Casa Grande walls were built of piled-up adobe that was then dried and sometimes smoothed, polished, and plastered. The roof was made of juniper, pine, fir, and mesquite wood. The house had a lower story that was filled in, creating a mound, second and third stories with five rooms, and a top story with a single tower-like room. A compound was created by building walls surrounding the house.

Research on the Hohokam period reveals dramatic changes in architecture, pottery, and funeral customs. Changes have been attributed to causes as varied as drought, culture collapse, and migration. As in most southwestern sites, control of water is essential to survival. Casa Grande’s location is a key to its function. Located at the end of an irrigation canal, it may be that the farmers controlled the water from the canal.

Danielle Greene

See also

United States of America, Prehistoric

References

McGuire, Randall H., and Michael B. Schiffer. 1982. Hohokam and Patayan: Prehistory of Southwestern Arizona. New York: Academic Press.

Ortiz, Alfono, vol. ed. 1979. Handbook of North American Indians: Southwest, Volume 9. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

Reid, Jefferson, and Stephanie Whittlesey. 1997. The Archaeology of Ancient Arizona. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Çatal Huyük

See Turkey

Catherwood, Frederick (1799–1854)

Frederick Catherwood and john lloyd stephens brought the great indigenous American civilizations of Central America to the attention of the world in the 1840s. Not only were Catherwood’s detailed drawings evidence of this great unknown culture, but they also remain valuable sources for details of Maya glyphs.

Catherwood was born in London, trained as an architect, and became an accomplished artist and architectural draftsman. He spent many years traveling in Greece and the Near East studying archaeological sites and drawing ruins. He and the antiquarian Robert Hay worked together on one of the first attempts to record Egyptian temples and monuments.

Catherwood returned to England, where the exhibition of his Near Eastern drawings brought him to the attention of the American adventurer John Lloyd Stephens, who had himself spent many years touring the archaeological sites of Greece, the Near East, and Egypt. The two developed a friendship based on their shared interest in archaeological exploration. It was Catherwood who alerted Stephen to two small books on the ruins of Central America, and together they began to plan an expedition to this unexplored region. Catherwood joined Stephens in New York where he had established a successful architectural practice. In the meantime Stephens wrote and published Incidents of Travel in Arabia Petraea in 1839 and another book about Greece, Turkey, Russia, and Poland, both of which became best-sellers and made him the fortune that was to finance an archaeological expedition to Central America.

The exotic ruined temples in the steamy jungles of Central America had, by this time, been noted by French explorers and artists such as Guillermo Dupaix and Jean Frederic Waldeck, and had provoked some interest in New York and Europe. In 1839, after Stephens managed to secure a useful presidential appointment as a diplomatic minister in Central America, the pair traveled to belize. The physical difficulties