A farming culture of the upper Salt (Río Salado) and Tonto Basin in southeastern Arizona, known for polychrome pottery, walled adobe compounds, and cliff dwellings, with long-distance trade reaching the Gulf of California and central Mexico (macaw feathers).
Declined and dispersed by around 1450 amid the broader 15th-century depopulation of the Hohokam/Southwest world; often treated by archaeologists as a cross-cultural 'horizon' or ceramic tradition rather than a single ethnic polity.
Scholarly synthesis of Salado-tradition archaeology by a leading Southwest archaeologist (Anthropological Papers of the University of Arizona).