Ball Courts and Political Centralization in the Casas Grandes Region

Abstract

Ball courts are well-known features of Mesoamerican societies and of the Hohokam culture of the American Southwest. In both cases, the courts are argued to have served a range of ritual, economic, and political purposes. Ball courts have long been known to exist in the northwestern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora as well as in the adjacent portion of New Mexico, although they have never been extensively described or interpreted. This paper presents a large, new set of ball court data for the area around the great Prehispanic center of Paquime (or Casas Grandes), Chihuahua. These data suggest that the region around Paquime may have been characterized by a relatively low level of political centralization, regardless of the social and economic alliances that existed among neighboring communities.

A Reinterpretation of the Occupational History of the Pendleton Ruin, New Mexico

“…The presence of Chihuahuan polychrome ceramics, the sporadic presence of Chihuahuan-style ball courts, shell jewelry, and a few architectural traits, suggest a special, but difficult to assess, relationship with the Casas Grandes region. IZidder and the Cosgroves in 1949 were the first to systematically recognize all of these attributes with the exception of Animas phase ball courts (Whalen and Minnis 1996).…”

3 Es nuestra tradicion: The Continuing Importance of Ballgames among Migrant Mixtec Communities in the United States

“…The ancient ballgame has long been a subject of heated debate among archaeologists. Scholars recognize that the ballgame was an important cultural institution in pre‐Hispanic Mesoamerica (Cohodas ; Day ; Fash and Fash ; Hill ; Taladoire ), and that it probably served different purposes and held different meanings to participating communities (see Day ; de la Garza ; Fox ; Gillespie ; Hill and Clark ; Koontz ; Kowalewski et al ; Taladoire , ; Uriarte ; Whalen and Minnis ; Wilkerson for alternative interpretations of the game).…”

Prehistory and early history of the Malpai Borderlands: Archaeological synthesis and recommendations

“…These features may have been frequently overlooked by study area investigators because of their unobtrusive character and failure to match expectations for ballcourt morphology. Recent survey investigations in the Casas Grandes region have demonstrated numerous instances of ballcourt structures and have provided new criteria for their recognition elsewhere (Naylor 1995;Whalen and Minnis 1996). In the area surrounding Casas Grandes, courts in locales with appreciable settlement do not always occur within the largest site.…”

“…Orientation seems to be consistently north-south. Although some Chihuahuan ballcourts are clearly I-or T-shaped, others are marked on the surface by simple parallel arrangements of rocks (Whalen and Minnis 1996).…”