Abandoned O’odham village: Snaketown, Arizona

Snaketown isn’t your average Arizona pitstop. It’s a small archaeological site on the Gila River Indian Community land, about 30 miles southeast of Phoenix, Arizona, named after another O’odham word for ‘place of snakes’. Snaketown is thought to have been inhabited by the Hohokam people, but the exact dates of occupation are subject to debate. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and is part of the Hohokam Pima National Monument, within the Gila River Indian Community. But here’s the strange part: it appears to have been abandoned suddenly, around 1150 CE. The houses were burned, and the site was not reoccupied. The Hohokam were farmers, even though they lived in an area with dry sandy soil, rugged volcanic mountains, and slow running rivers. They made the soil fertile by channeling water from the local river through a series of man-made canals.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata