The word Hohokam is a Piman language term for “all used up” or “exhausted,” and the name given by archeologists to the ancient farming peoples of the southern deserts of Arizona.

The Hohokam lived in the Phoenix Basin along the Gila and Salt Rivers, in southern Arizona along the Santa Cruz and San Pedro Rivers, and north on the Lower Verde River and along the New and Agua Fria Rivers. Hohokam influences were even more widespread, with Hohokam-style architecture and artifacts as far north as Flagstaff, Arizona, south into northern Sonora, Mexico, and east into southwestern New Mexico.

Upon the top of Indian Mesa, a flat top hill whose sides are steep cliffs, the remains of the Hohokam village ruins are found. Indian Mesa is located within the Lake Pleasant Regional Park grounds by the shores of Lake Pleasant and Agua Fria River all of which is in the Bradshaw Mountain Range. The Lake Pleasant Regional Park is within the municipal limits of Peoria, Arizona.

The mesa top ruins are an important archaeological site of the Hohokam prehistoric people and the remains of the village is monitored by the Arizona Site Stewards and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. There is a small, steep and narrow path which begins at the skirt of the hill and leads to the top of the mesa.

Sometime about the years from 1000 CE to AD CE, Native Americans from the Hohokam cultural tradition built a village on the top of Indian Mesa and this structure would have provided a home to some 100 to 200 people in this location. Too, the location was an easily defensible position for these Hohokam, if in the event, their village was ever attacked by invaders.