14.4: North America

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The Southwest

Southwestern indigenous cultures have produced a variety of architectural, artisanal, and ritual art forms for centuries.

Learning Objectives

Describe the Anasazi, Hopi, Navajo, and Hohokam cultures of the American Southwest

Key Takeaways

Key Points

The Anasazi, the ancestors of Pueblo Native American tribes, produced decorative pottery for storage purposes.
Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (c. 10th century) is one of the most impressive early examples of Southwestern Native American architecture.
The Navajo emigrated from Northern Canada to the Southwest sometime after 1000 CE. The sand paintings and weavings for which this culture is renowned are gender-specific. Men created sand paintings while women created weavings.
Mastery of acid etching allowed the Hohokam culture to create lasting designs in bone, shell, and stone.

Key Terms

Anasazi: A Native American people who once lived in cliff dwellings in Utah and Colorado.
Pueblo: Modern and ancient communities of Native Americans in the Southwestern United States of America.
xeriscaping: Landscaping and gardening that reduces or eliminates the need for supplemental water from irrigation.
Navajo: Currently the largest Native American tribe in North America.

The Anasazi (1000 BCE–700 CE) are the ancestors of today’s Pueblo tribes. Their culture formed in the American southwest after the cultivation of corn was introduced from Mexico around 1200 BCE. Additionally, the Navajo and Apache emigrated from Northern Canada to the Southwest sometime after 1000 CE. People of this region developed an agrarian lifestyle, cultivating food, storage gourds, and cotton with irrigation or xeriscaping techniques. They lived in sedentary towns, so pottery used to store water and grain was ubiquitous . For hundreds of years, the Anasazi created utilitarian grayware and black-on-white pottery as well as orange and red ceramics . Turquoise, jet, and spiny oyster shell were traditionally used by Ancestral Pueblo for jewelry and sophisticated inlay .

Anasazi Architecture

Southwest architecture includes cliff dwellings (multi-story settlements carved from living rock), pit houses, and adobe and sandstone pueblos. One of the most elaborate and largest ancient settlements is Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, which includes 15 major complexes of sandstone and timber connected by a network of roads. The largest of these settlements, Pueblo Bonito, contains over 800 rooms .

Pueblo Bonito: The impressive Pueblo Bonito was built by the Ancestral Puebloans as one of several settlements at Chaco Canyon.

Hopi Culture

The Hopi culture emerged in the Southwest in the fourteenth century. Hopi communities created ceramic jars, dough bowls, and food bowls of different sizes for daily use, as well as more elaborate ceremonial mugs, jugs, ladles, seed jars and vessels for ritual use. These were usually finished with polished surfaces and decorated with black painted designs.

Among Hopi ritual art is the kachina figure. This instructs young girls and new brides about katsinas or katsinam, the immortal beings that bring rain, control aspects of the natural world and society, and act as messengers between humans and the spirit world.

This figure has a realistic body shape, a large head with a beak-like nose, and a feather attached to the top of its head.

Hopi Kachina Figure: The Kachina figure originated in the 18th century as a flat object with an almost indistinguishable shape that suggested a head and contained minimal body paint. By the late 19th century, it assumed a more realistic appearance.

Navajo Culture

Art in the Navajo culture is traditionally gender-based. Men, seen as static in nature, create sand paintings for healing rituals. Because the pattern must be precise if the infirm person is to be cured, men were believed to be better suited for this work. Because sand paintings must be destroyed at the end of the ritual, tradition dictates that the designs not be photographed or otherwise documented. Women, on the other hand, were seen as more dynamic in nature and thus better suited for the creation of woven fabrics, such as blankets and rugs, whose patterns do not have to be exact. Unlike sand paintings, blankets and rugs are made to be long-lasting and therefore may be photographed.

This blanket is mostly red with some blue and white to create lines in the design.

Probably Bayeta-style Blanket with Terrace and Stepped Design: Navajo, 1870-80.

Hohokam Culture

Around 200 CE, the Hohokam culture developed in Arizona as the ancestors of the Tohono O’odham and Akimel O’odham or Pima tribes. The Hohokam are credited as the first culture to master acid etching. Artisans produced jewelry from shell, stone, bone, and carved stone figures. Pottery and textile production also flourished.

Image of the outside and inside of an etched shell. A creature with a face is etched on the outside, and intricate designs are etched on the inside.

Hohokam Etched Shell: This shell was produced by the Hohokam culture of the Southwest.