Visions Around and Within: A GIS-based Viewshed Analysis of Ancient Ballcourts in Northern Arizona

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

By the eleventh and twelfth centuries AD, the region around modern-day Flagstaff was an emergent ceremonial landscape, evidenced by the proximity of sacred places, important topographic features, and large forms of ritual architecture. The latter included plazas, unroofed great kivas, platformed spaces, and ballcourts, which were engaged by people traversing a broader network of trails and shrines. In this poster, we consider how this landscape was experienced by examining the location and visibility of the region’s 12 known ballcourts. These represent the northernmost examples of this quintessential Mesoamerican structure. Despite similarities in size and alignment, each seems to have unique visibilities in terms of viewership and sightlines to significant landforms. This poster uses GIS viewshed tools to explore two dimensions of ritual experience through visibility: how ballcourt activities were viewed from surrounding terrain and what vistas were observable from within the structures themselves.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39293.0