Archaeologists have long compared the Hohokam world of the North American Southwest to contemporary traditions in Mesoamerica and West Mexico. A degree of cultural connectivity between the Southwest and Mesoamerica is evident in similarities in public architecture, ceramic technology and design, ritual paraphernalia, and subsistence, among other qualities. Researchers commonly frame this connectivity in economic or cultural evolutionary terms that position Hohokam communities as somehow descendant from or dependent on more complexly and hierarchically organized societies far to the south. In this paper, I examine this connectivity through the lens of iconography to show that shared religious themes and archetypes were strands within the nexus. I focus on three iconographic subjects in Hohokam media—serpents, flowers, and “pipettes”—each of which materializes seemingly Mesoamerican religious concepts. From a careful consideration of the inception and breadth of each, I argue that Hohokam artisans began to portray these subjects in concert with a religious revitalization movement that drew a degree of inspiration from the south. However, while the iconography may have been new to Hohokam media, the religious themes were not. I show that the iconography references Archaic religious archetypes and cosmological principles that probably accompanied the spread of agriculture millennia before the formation of the Hohokam world. Rather than representing a new religion, I suggest Hohokam artisans materialized these long-established and unquestioned principles in novel iconographic ways as a means of naturalizing and ordaining the rapid social change that accompanied the religious revitalization movement.

考古学家长期以来一直将北美西南部的霍霍卡姆世界与中美洲和西墨西哥的当代传统进行比较。西南部和中美洲之间一定程度的文化联系在公共建筑、陶瓷技术和设计、仪式用具和生活等方面的相似之处显而易见。研究人员通常用经济或文化进化的术语来构建这种连通性，将霍霍卡姆社区定位为某种程度上源自或依赖于更复杂、等级制度更远的南方社会。在本文中，我通过图像学的视角研究了这种连通性，以表明共享的宗教主题和原型是这种联系中的线索。我关注霍霍卡姆媒体中的三个图像主题——蛇、花朵和“吸管”——每一个都体现了看似中美洲的宗教概念。通过仔细考虑每个主题的起源和广度，我认为霍霍卡姆工匠开始描绘这些主题，与宗教复兴运动相结合，该运动在一定程度上从南方汲取了灵感。然而，虽然图像对于 Hohokam 媒体来说可能是新鲜事，但宗教主题却并非如此。我表明这些图像参考了古老的宗教原型和宇宙学原理，这些原理可能伴随着霍霍卡姆世界形成之前几千年的农业传播。我建议霍霍卡姆工匠以新颖的图像方式将这些长期确立且不容置疑的原则具体化，而不是代表一种新的宗教，作为自然化和规定伴随宗教复兴运动而来的快速社会变革的一种手段。