The scarlet macaw (Ara macao) was an important prehistoric trade item in northern Mexico and southwestern United States. Paquimé (or Casas Grandes) in northwestern Chihuahua has been assumed to have dominated or even monopolized the macaw trade. This conclusion is a result of the fact that Paquimé is the only site with evidence of substantial macaw-breeding facilities. Two recent archaeological projects in Chihuahua indicate that macaw production was not limited to Casas Grandes. Furthermore, the political relations of production for these ritually and economically important birds differed depending on whether or not the producers were part of the complex polity centered at Casas Grandes.

Ball courts are well-known features of Mesoamerican societies and of the Hohokam culture of the American Southwest. In both cases, the courts are argued to have served a range of ritual, economic, and political purposes. Ball courts have long been known to exist in the northwestern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora as well as in the adjacent portion of New Mexico, although they have never been extensively described or interpreted. This paper presents a large, new set of ball court data for the area around the great Prehispanic center of Paquime (or Casas Grandes), Chihuahua. These data suggest that the region around Paquime may have been characterized by a relatively low level of political centralization, regardless of the social and economic alliances that existed among neighboring communities.

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Architecture both reflects and emphasizes the distinctions upon which social and political organization are based. In particular, an "architecture of power" has been recognized in a number of hierarchical, prehistoric cultural contexts, from the Chacoans to the Mississippians. In these cases, the specific architectural style of a central place is replicated at points in the surrounding area, either as an imitative response by local populations or as a tangible reflection of control exerted from the major political center. The latter situation seems the most likely in the area close around the primate center of Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico. Here, architectural data from the authors' recent survey and excavation projects are used to recognize a local architecture of power, to trace its distribution, and to postulate several different types of control nodes in the area lying around the primate center. These nodes vary in type and level of elaboration, and it is argued that this variation reflects the nodes" different roles in the organization of Casas Grandes" hinterland.

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