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A Pre-Spanish Rubber Ball from Arizona198

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Emil W. Haury
Emil W. Haury*
Affiliation:
Gila Pueblo, Globe, Arizona
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Extract

In the winter of 1934–35, a ball-court, analogous in many details with those of Central America, was discovered at Snaketown on the Gila River Indian Reservation in south-central Arizona, during excavations conducted by Gila Pueblo. The announcement of a ball-court 1500 miles from its supposed origin, and in a region where it was entirely unexpected, met with skepticism until the discovery was verified by men qualified to judge from first hand knowledge acquired in the Middle American field. A new angle to the problem of relationships of Southwestern, Mexican, and Central American cultures was thus brought to the fore. Now, to add to this discovery, comes another find in the form of a rubber ball. It, too, was found in south-central Arizona and may, indeed, have been used in the game for which the courts were built.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , April 1937 , pp. 282 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1937

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Footnotes

198

A preliminary notice of this ball, by Charles Amsden, will be found in The Masterkey, Vol. X, No. 1, pp. 7–8, Jan., 1936.

References

200 Blom, F., The Maya Ball-Game Pok-ta-pok, Middle American Research Series, Publication No. 4, Middle American Papers, pp. 487–527, 1932 Google Scholar.

201 Lloyd, F. E., 1911, Guayule: A Rubber-Plant of the Chihuahuan Desert, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication No. 193, p. 6 Google Scholar.

202 The lack of house remains on the surface is easily understood, as during the period represented by the find, houses were semi-subterranean and their presence is not manifested by surface features.

203 Oviedo, 1851, Vol. I, p. 165, describes.the balls of Central America as manufactured “out of roots of trees and herbs and juices and mixtures of wax and pitch.”

204 By letter, January 8, 1936.

205 “ … In the Codex Mendoza we see that twenty-two towns located on the Gulf Coast between northern Oaxaca and the Gulf paid 16,000 rubber balls as tribute every year to the court of Mexico.” Blom, F., Op. cit., p. 498.