Ball Courts and Political Centralization in the Casas Grandes Region

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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.