Playing the Game: an Analysis of Hohokam Ballcourt Structures

Summary

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

Despite nearly a hundred years of research, Hohokam Ballcourt Structures remain a conundrum for archaeologists. What they were used for, who could access the courts (or the events that occurred in them), or even if the communities that built them utilized them for activities besides ballgames all remain ambiguous. This poster elucidates a performance theory-based analysis of Hohokam Ballcourt Structures from across Arizona. This framework was chosen as it has been successfully utilized to analyze architectural structures and practices in both large- and small-scale societies around the world. My analysis consisted of identifying sites with ballcourts and compiling feature maps for 67 different ballcourt structures. The feature maps were then digitized and analyzed using GIS to calculate two estimations for the number of observers for each court, representing two potential crowd densities. The number of observers was then compared to site population estimates to try and answer three questions: (1) Is ballcourt size influenced by the population size of the communities that built them? (2) What percentage of the community within the Hohokam Ballcourt world had prime viewing of activities occurring within ballcourts? (3) Was access to these structures open to the public or restricted?

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): 40009.0