A typical track is 250 meters long, about ten metes wide, and is perfectly straight and cleared of rocks. North of Phoenix on Perry Mesa and Black Mesa, and near large pueblos such as Polles Mesa along the Verde River, one can find mysterious linear features that archaeologists believe were used as racetracks for ritual footraces. Wilcox, Senior Research Anthropologist at the Museum of Northern Arizona and others, has made a compelling case for Haury's original ballcourt interpretation, which remains the prevailing opinion of the archaeological community.Īs an interesting aside, ballcourts are not the only communal sports facilities constructed in the pre-Columbian Southwest. In 1967, Ferdon published a paper pointing out the differences between Mesoamerican and Hohokam ballcourts, and proposed that the Hohokam courts are more similar to dance courts used by the Papago. This counterview was later supported by Edwin Ferdon, Assistant Director of the Arizona State University under Emil Haury and a former student of Brand's (yes, archaeology is a small world). Donald Brand, a cultural geographer who taught at the University of New Mexico, proposed in 1939 that the 'ballcourts' were actually dance plazas.

These differences have led some researchers to propose alternative theories. Also, only two balls (one made of stone, and the other of rubber) have ever been excavated from a Hohokam ballcourt. Mesoamerican ballcourts have a typical length-to-width ratio of 4-to-1, whereas Hohokam courts are more usually 2-to-1. Mesoamerican ballcourts are rectangular, have flat floors, nearly vertical walls, and are made from stone, whereas the Hohokam version is oval, has floors that slope gradually toward the center, walls that slope at 45 to 60 degrees, and are constructed from excavated earth. However, the designation of these structures as 'ballcourts' is not without controversy. The Casa Grande Great House is in background. Some researchers mark the beginning of Hohokam culture as early 1 AD, and its demise as late as 1450.Īn unexcavated ballcourt at Casa Grande Ruin. Note that these dates are approximate, and vary slightly from source to source. These phases, known as the Hohokam Sequence, are shown below. The word means, poignantly enough, ' all used up.'Īrchaeologists have identified multiple chronological phases of Hohokam culture, based on changes in geographic extent, pottery styles, architecture, canal building, and other attributes. The name ' Hohokam' is from the language of the Akimel and Tohono O'odham people, two present-day Native American communities in central Arizona that claim the Hohokam as their ancestors. For reasons that are still not completely understood, all of these cultures went into a sudden and permanent decline between approximately 13 AD, about a hundred years before contact with Europeans. The others include the Anasazi, centered around the Four Corners region where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah meet the Sinagua, located around Flagstaff and along the Verde River of Arizona and the Mogollon, who occupied eastern Arizona, southern New Mexico, and portions of the northern Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua. Occupying the region around modern-day Phoenix along the Salt and Gila Rivers, the Hohokam were one of several relatively advanced cultures in the American Southwest during that period. The Hohokam were a prehistoric people that inhabited the Sonoran desert of central Arizona from about AD 300 to AD 1400.

Hohokam native american