Written and published by Linden Alexander Pentecost. This article is not yet complete. 

Arizona has many indigenous cultures. Generally speaking the Pueblo peoples and their Uto-Aztecan languages such as Hopi and O’odham are deeply and anciently indigenous to this landscape. The same I think can be said with regard to the speakers of Yuman languages, like the Maricopa, although since very ancient times the lifestyles of the two groups have been very different, as are their origin stories different.

From what I understand, the speakers of for example Navajo and Apache in Arizona also claim to have ancient spiritual connections to this landscape, and I think that in a metaphorical and otherworldly sense this is true, but in terms of the actual longevity of association and continuity between most ancient archaeological cultures in the area, and the present day indigenous peoples, I feel that the Hopi and some other groups embody and contain this ancient continuity the most.

Uto-Aztecan languages do, from my research, (unlike some other Native American languages) have very few similarities (but some, nonetheless) to languages I speak and am more familiar with in for example Europe. I have observed some similarities though which I have published elsewhere, perhaps naturally, more so to other language families in the Americas. This contrasts with Quechua for example, which contains a large number of lexical and certain other similarities to languages outside of the Americas, including to Uralic, which I have published about in detail.
Some examples of possible similarities seen with the O’odham language for this article, include for example Tohono O’odham kahchk - “lake”, compare Quechua qucha/qocha - “lake” and to Aymara quta - “lake” for example. The O’odham word ban, meaning “coyote” is curious for its similarity to many words for “dog” or “wolf” I have seen across other languages, including for example a similarity to Mochica (a language of Northern Peru) word fanu - “dog”, and to older Finnish peni - “dog” and to other words in Uralic and in other languages. The O’odham word watopi - “fish” or “worm” also bares some similarity to Finnish mato - “worm”. The O’odham word gogs - “dog” also bares some similarity to English “dog” and the Georgian word ძაღლი, [ʒaɣli] - “dog”. The aforementioned O’odham words were sourced from the O’odham - English dictionary on Glosbe.

There is another culture however, who was present in the landscape of Southern Arizona at the same time as the O’odham in the past, and the two tribes were often thought to have been at war with each other and quite different from each other - even though it is generally assumed that this other tribe spoke a Uto-Aztecan language. This other tribe were known as the Hohokam, and they are the tribe connected to the area around Signal Hill in the present day. Some accounts suggest that the Hohokam are ancestral to the O’odham, whilst other accounts suggest that the two peoples were always distinctly different from each other.

I understand that these Hohokam people were connected to the Hopi and O’odham in some way however, and that it is likely that the main linguistic landscape of the Hohokam would have been one of a strong Uto-Aztecan base. Although, when I look at the archaeology of the Hohokam, and the strong similarities between for example certain Hohokam petroglyphs, and Bronze Age Nordic petroglyphs depicting ships and serpent like beings, I wonder if in some way the Hohokam were connected to more distant cultures, at least in terms of their symbolic language, whilst their main language and cultural traits were likely Uto-Aztecan.

Some of these petroglyphs, for example spirals, are also known to the Hopi though, and it could be said that this “symbolic language” does link certain parts of the Americas specifically to certain parts of the Old World, in a way unrelated to the many spoken lexical and other similarities between some indigenous American and Old World languages.

The Hohokam are known for their knowledge of farming and water irrigation, things which some other Uto-Aztecan speaking cultures, like the Aztecs and Hopi, particularly in terms of agriculture, are without doubt a part of.

But the large scale engineering of canals by the Hohokam people also makes them again, in some ways symbolically similar to cultures like the Sumerians and later Middle Eastern peoples who developed agricultural canal systems in dry areas (after a cataclysm or large change, in all likelihood). So it seems to me unlikely that, considering especially many of these cultures used these same systems at the same times in history, that it is unlikely that there was not some kind of connection. It is again worth noting that the spiral and certain other petroglyphs found at Hohokam sites are not representative of all types of petroglyph worldwide, only certain places and cultures seem to use the same primal symbolic language, even if, of course, there are local variations within it. Some of the other petroglyph signs at certain Hohokam sites would not be out of place in for example, North Yorkshire for instance.

Another strange thing about certain Hohokam petroglyph sites, such as that at Signal Hill is that the petroglyphs tend to be inscribed on large, roundish or smooth rocks, which are of a different colour to the bedrock in the nearby landscape. Often these rocks themselves seem to be formed into mound-like shapes, and it is pretty unclear to me how these rocky mounds could have formed through natural processes. Clearly they are sacred and different in some way from the rest of the landscape to the indigenous peoples, hence the petroglyphs, so the question here is, what do they say about how these sites were created? Were they already sacred in the wetter, more ancient past, before the present world came into being? This would coincide with something I wrote in another publication recently about Northern English folklore and the way in which cup-marked stones were sometimes said to have been created when the rock was soft - a concept which aligns well to the Hopi history about the Arizona landscape in the previous world, when the land was wetter and the rocks, in a sense softer and more malleable.

Signal Hill is a good example of one of these sites, and I will go on to discuss this with photos. The “Painted Rock” petroglyph site in Arizona is another example, and is many ways akin to signal hill, with the rocks being of a similar nature. The Chamber of the Sun petroglyph site in Arizona also contains similar megalithic rocks. Another example is the Deer Valley Petroglyph Preserve in Arizona, using similar kind of rocks, although some of them are smaller. The Agua Fria national monument in Arizona, with its own petroglyphs, also has some very unusual stone features, with some of the rocks looking as though they have been altered when soft, or over time.

Below are photos of the Signal Hill petroglyph site, showing different petroglyphs and features, above each of the photos is a detailed description for each photo in Italics.