Day 3: Casa Grande

      On our way to Biosphere 2, we came across the Casa Grande Ruins near Cordes, Arizona. Four stories high, and 60 feet long, it is the largest known structure of the Hohokum people of the Sonoran Desert.

     Archealogists use the term Hohokum as a term to define a cultural period.  When the Spanish missionaries came across the ruins in the 1690s, they asked the descendents of the area who built the ruin.  The natives at that time explained that it was the "Huhgham" or Ancestral People.

     What was the purpose of the building?  No one knows.  We do know that the windows in the building can map out, accurately, the equinoxes and solstices.  The area was at the crossroads of several trade routes, and this could have been built so that traders would see it from a far an know where to come.

Local natives giving a jewelry making demonstration.  You can also buy jewelry.

 

 

     A steel and concrete canopy built in 1932 stands to protect the building.