HUM 221: A vanished people, ball games

In Phoenix just north of Salt River and Sky Harbor International Airport, stand the ruins of an ancient Indian village, or pueblo, inhabited by a people we call the Hohokam until about 1400 A.D. Partially restored, it is now a municipal museum and archaelogical park called Pueblo Grande. We don't know what the Hohokam people called it. In fact, we don't really know who they were. Today's Pima and Tohono O'odham Indians, who may be descended from them, call them the Hohokam. The name means "used up" or "those who went before."

Read up on Pueblo Grade, the Hohokam and what we can infer about their culture. Pay special attention to their ball game and our best guesses of how it fit into the their culture. You'll have an opportunity to blog on it later.

There's an atmosphere of mystery as you visit Pueblo Grande, you can see the ruins of the platform mound, a large adobe building divided into apartment-like units, as well as the ball court, a couple of reconstructed dwellings and an irrigation ditch. The ditch still collects water, and I heard frogs when I visited several years ago.

In fact, Phoenix is located where it is because the first white settlers in the 1880s were able to use the old Hohokam irrigation canals to water their crops. The Hohokam and the Pima successfully farmed the desert for more than a thousand years.

Part of the mystery is that we have to guess at what Hohokam culture was like. The people left no written records, so we infer what we know about them from archaeology. The canals they left are a lot like the Pima's, for example, so we can infer their agriculture was similar.

Even more mysterious are the ball courts. We know they're like ceremonial ball courts in Mexico, so we infer the ball games were like those played in Mexico. But we can't be sure. In fact, what we know about the Mexican games comes from records of an Aztec game and a surviving traditional ballgame in Mexico called ulama.

Scientists have a pretty good idea how Hohokam must have played the game, though. This article in Tuscon Weekly is a good reconstruction. DesertUSA, a tourism website, has a good overview of the Hohokam people, and how the ball play might have fit into the overall culture.

n interactive webpage explaining a Hohokam village ... click on features of the map, like the houses, the platform mound or irrigation canals, to read about each. The ball court is in the lower right.

Your blog question: Read this account by an anthropologist in 1880 of the Cherokee stick ball game and its origins. It is by James Mooney, a famous ethnographer who did his research in the 1880s and 1890s. What role did athletics play in Native cultures? How does it compare to the role played by athletics in our culture today.


Last Page