Excavations At Snaketown

"[Gladwin] accomplished, from the 1920's on, a series of fundamentally important studies of the prehistoric cultures of the region from Texas to California. None of these surveys or excavations was more important than the excavation of Snaketown, in the southern Arizona desert. It provided a wealth of details for a major prehistoric culture, the Hohokam, which previously had been scarcely recognized. It dislodged many long-held dogmas of Southwestern archaeology and provided the basis for a major reorientation in thinking about the nature of the prehistoric occupations of Arizona and adjacent states. . . . [This volume] has remained indispensable for its detailed reporting of house remains, ball courts, canals, cremations, pottery, carved stone, and other artifacts."—Science "The reprint will come as a blessing to many archaeologists who have sought in vain to obtain a copy of the original volume. It now stands as a body of data easily accessible to all workers, and we look forward to a new phase of synthesis of Hohokam archaeology."—American Antiquity

"For a calculated 1,400 years, Snaketown was a viable village, but unlike so many tells in the Near East, the people remained the same while their culture changed. The smoothly graded typological sequences for most attributes suggest to me that the ethnic identity of the inhabitants was not interrupted, that they were one and the same people experiencing normal internal evolutionary cultural modifications with occasional boosts of features and ideas newly arrived from the outside." —Emil W. Haury