![]() In the mid-1970s, the Arizona State Museum conducted excavations in a relatively small area and encountered nine pit structures, soil mining pits (where the Hohokam dug up soil and caliche for roofing and wall adobe and plaster), and roasting pits where food was cooked. The soldiers marched away in 1893 and Fort Lowell eventually became a park. Adolf Bandelier (1840-1914), one of the earliest ethnologists and archaeologists in the American Southwest, visited Fort Lowell in 1884 and noted the presence of a prehistoric trash mound in the fort’s Parade Ground. ![]() ![]() It is likely that the soldiers who built the fort noticed artifacts scattered about the ground. One of the major Hohokam sites in the Tucson is the Hardy Site, located at Fort Lowell, a military fortress that was established in 1873 a few miles northeast of downtown Tucson. Hundreds of Hohokam archaeological sites have been examined by archaeologists, and when combined with oral histories of descendant Pima and O’odham people, a better understanding of the lives of these Ancestral Native Americans has been developed. The Hohokam are well known for their beautiful painted pottery, elaborate projectile points, carved stone and shell items, ballcourts, and platform mounds. The word Hohokam refers to the archaeological culture that existed in the Sonoran Desert from about AD 500 to 1450. Homer Thiel talks about the Hardy Site and what the structures and artifacts recorded there teach us about Hohokam lifeways in the eastern Tucson Basin. The Hohokam of Fort Lowell: The Hardy Site
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