What Does Salado Mean?

Salt River Canyon Dam Site, 1898.

The origins and movement of the Salado inhabitants of the Tonto Basin has perplexed archeologists for many years. Between A.D.1250 to 1450 the Salado people influenced a large number of cultural groups within the southwestern United States through their iconographic pottery designs. The spread of the Salado culture became known as the Salado Phenomenon.

The distribution of Salado polychrome pottery encompasses 130,000 square kilometers that include central Arizona, southwest New Mexico, and the northern Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua (Clarke 2001: Crown 1994). Despite the great influence of the Salado culture, archaeologists continue to have questions about who the Salado people were.

What Does Salado Mean?

The term Salado comes from the Spanish name Rio Salado, or the Salt River, that runs from the White Mountains in eastern Arizona through the Tonto Basin to the canyons of central Arizona (Houk 1992). The term Salado, when used in reference to southwestern archeology, can have three different meanings

1. A prehistoric cultural group living in the Tonto Basin of the Salt River drainage in central Arizona from A.D. 1250-1450
2. Sets of artifacts and architecture found in southern Arizona and northern Mexico
3. A prehistorical religious belief system or “cult” (Downum 2008).

Here we reference the first definition for Salado, a cultural group. In 1930, Harold and Winifred Gladwin of Gila Pueblo Archaeological Foundation in Globe, AZ introduced the term Salado in print to refer to a cultural group having distinct features.

Gladwin states: “Salado is the name suggested to cover the remains of the people who colonized the Upper Salt River drainage, and who developed various specialized features in the region adjacent to Roosevelt Lake” (Houk 1992:2). The distinct features included multistoried adobe structures and polychrome pottery. Gladwin proposed that the Salado people were Puebloans who moved southwest from the upper Little Colorado River area around A.D. 1000 (Clarke 2001) Gladwin thought that a second migration occurred by people from around the Four Corners region bringing the Puebloan architecture and Gila polychrome ware influence (Clarke 2001).

Other archeologists have theorized how the Salado culture developed in the Tonto Basin, and who the Salado people were. Emil Haury suggested that the Salado people developed through the amalgamation of northern Anasazi groups and eastern Mogollon groups who migrated to the area (Clarke 2001: Houk 1992). Today archeologists continue to debate this topic. Some think that the Salado formed through an influx of Mogollon people from the south and the Phoenix Basin Hohokam people from the southeast into the lower Tonto Basin. Many archeologists believe that a group of local inhabitants, residing in the area since Archaic times, who interacted with the Hohokam composed the Salado culture.

 

Looking at Roosevelt Lake from Tonto National Monument’s Upper Cliff Dwelling.

Salado Context

The Salado phenomenon has two different patterns identifiable in both regional and local contexts. The “Local Salado” is the Salado cultural pattern in the Tonto Basin that becomes distorted the further away from the center of the basin a group resides (Dean 2000). The “Regional Salado” is characterized by Salado polychrome ceramics that cannot take on a specific definition because the pottery is found in a variety of contexts (Dean 2000). As stated above, the Salado polychrome wares date to the Roosevelt and Gila Phases. The following descriptions of each phase refer to the Local Salado cultural pattern.

The Roosevelt phase (A.D. 1250-1350) is characterized by small hamlets and villages with shallow pit structures. Small platform mounds are centrally located within the communities may be the center of religious, political, and ceremonial life. Special use sites, such as field houses and camps for gathering and processing resources such as wild plants or game, are dispersed across the landscape away from the hamlets and villages. Farming was conducted using irrigation canals, floodwater fields with check dams, and other water diverting devices. Dry farming was also used. Cotton was grown and used to weave products that were possibly traded for goods, like ceramics and shells, from other regions. The dead were both cremated and buried. Pinto polychrome was common during this time, but other styles of ceramics were common such as Tonto and Salado Corrugated utilitarian wares, and pottery from Mogollon neighbors to the north like Pinedale Polychrome and Cedar Creek Polychrome.

The Gila Phase (A.D. 1350 to 1450) saw major changes in settlement patterns. Most lowland platform mound communities of the Roosevelt Phase were abandoned with the population aggregating in a small number of settlements. Most upland communities were abandoned as well with only three communities existing in the area during this time. The two cliff dwellings and associated open air sites now part of Tonto National Monument comprised one of the existing communities. Platform mounds during this time were larger than in the Roosevelt Phase. Some archeologists suggest that the mounds appear to have defensive features such as more substantial walls and fewer access points into the compound. Gila and Tonto Polychromes were made during this time, and were widely traded and imitated across a large area of the southern Southwest.

More generally, the platform mounds found at sites during these phases had different forms and functions depending on the context in which they were built. Platform mounds supported structures for housing people as well as activities representing communal support of social, political, and religious leadership. These platform mound communities were typically small-scaled, stratified communities with elites and non-elites observed in differential burial treatments (Dean 2000). However, evidence suggests that the elites did not accumulate significant amounts of wealth nor was the power differential between the non-elites and elites great or absolute (Dean 2000). Complex, hierarchical communities, like that observed in Tonto Basin, are typically characteristic of larger societies. However, the low population estimates in the Basin at this time suggest that complex, hierarchal communities are sustainable with fewer people than previously believed (Dean 2000). Some researches think that the Tonto Basin communities were organized into “confederacies” around irrigation systems by elite social connections (Dean 2000).

 

Tonto Polychrome ceramic vessel.

The Spread of Salado Iconography

The spread of the Salado Polychrome iconography across the region may have been a response to the turmoil in the area during 1250-1450 A.D. Regional and local environmental crises, such as droughts, would have increased the uncertainty of food production thus exaggerating social inequalities, unequal access to resources, and unequal distribution of wealth (Dean 2000). Many communities were mobile during this period causing different social group interactions, ethnic mixing, and the displacement of established groups in the region. These changes would require the development of new methods for incorporating immigrants into established communities, interacting with other social groups, managing internal and external disputes, and organizing multiethnic communities (Dean 2000).

In the 1990s Patricia Crown identified the Regional Salado phenomenon as a regional religious cult. Crown (1994) suggests that the appearance of Salado Polychrome wares across the southwest and into Mexico is an expression of a regional religious system. In her view, the pottery represents the symbolic expression of a religious or ideological movement she calls the Southwestern Cult. Through her research, Crown determined that Salado Polychrome vessels were often locally made at the sites where they are found and not imported. She suggests that people across the southern Southwest were adopting new symbols representing a new religious belief system. The iconography represents an easily transmittable ideological system (i.e. through pottery) that could have helped to more easily facilitate the changes within the region and be adapted to fit certain community’s needs (Dean 2000).

However, this is not normally how the spread of a homogeneous ideological cult occurs across societies. If the Salado Phenomenon spread from the Tonto Basin fulfilling the above problems through situational adaptations, researchers may not be able to identify diagnostic elements of the Southwest Cult to understand how the cult was organized into a system. For example, Dean (2000) suggests that the spread of the Katsina Cult to the north of Tonto Basin through the distribution of Jeddito Yellow Ware Ceramics and design styles may represent a parallel northern response to similar environmental problems. However, unlike Salado polychromes Jeddito Yellow ware was produce in and disseminated from a single area in the Hopi Mesas.

The Movement of the Salado

The Salado began migrating out of Tonto Basin leaving the large, platform mound communities after A.D. 1350. By A.D. 1450 the people of Tonto Basin moved on to other places. Reasons causing people to leave this area vary. Some archeologists suggest that cycles of droughts and floods negatively affected agricultural practices, or the presence of warfare and conflict were important reasons for people leaving. The origins and disappearance of the Salado culture in Tonto Basin remains a mystery. However, the influence of the Salado people covered a large portion of the Southwest and can be identified in the archeological record through the spread of the Salado polychrome iconographic and design styles.

Literature Cited:

Clarke, Jeffery J 2001 Tracking Prehistoric Migrations: Pueblo Settlers among the Tonto Basin Hohokam. Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona, No.65. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Crown, Patricia 1994 Ceramics and Ideology: Salado Polychrome Pottery. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Dean, Jeffery (editor) 2000 Salado. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Elson, Mark D. 1996 A Revised Chronology and Phase Sequence for the Lower Tonto Basin of Central Arizona. Kiva 62(2):117- 147.

Gladwin, Harold S. 1957 A History of the Ancient Southwest. Bond-Wheelwright, Portland.

Gladwin, Winifred, and Harold S. Gladwin 1930 Some Southwestern Pottery Types: Series I. Medallion Papers No. 8. Gila Pueblo, Globe.

Houk, Rose 1992 Salado: Prehistoric Cultures of the Southwest. Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, Tucson, AZ.

Lyons, Patrick D. and Alexander J. Lindsay Jr. 2006 Perforated Plates and the Salado Phenomenon. Kiva 72(1):5-54.

Reid, J. Jefferson, and Stephanie Whittlesey 1997 The Salado. In The Archaeology of Ancient Arizona, by J.J. Reid and S. Whittlesey, pp 230-258. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.

Simon, Arleyn W., James H. Burton, and David R. Abbott 1998 Intraregional Connections in the Development and Distribution of Salado Polychromes in Central Arizona. Journal of Anthropological Research 54(4):519-547.