Although we know little of the Hohokam religion, many of their concerns with the supernatural must have revolved around the power to influence the productivity of both cultivated and natural resources, and around the trauma of death. Both concerns often play important roles in belief systems or religions of preliterate agricultural peoples, and were probably also important to their prehistoric Hohokam. Community ritual activities may have centered on the ball courts-large elliptical depressions surrounded by earthen embankments-found in most villages, where some version of the Mezzo-American ball game may have been played. In prehistoric Mexico, the ball bouncing between the players on opposing teams represented the sum struggling to rise out of the night sky and then falling again at the end of the day, as well as a changing of the seasons. A similar belief may have been held by the Hohokam and dramatized by them in their ball courts. During the classic period, the focus of the village rituals may have shifted from the ball courts to the platform mounds, another form of architecture constructed by the Hohokam. In addition to the rituals that took place in the ball courts and on the mounds other important ceremonies probably accompanied the cremation and burial of the dead.
Pagemaster: Dion
Copyright 1998