The main structure of the Casa Grande Ruins is believed to have been built around 1350 CE by the people who occupied the river valleys of the Sonoran desert in the area around what is now the modern cities of Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona. The ancestral Sonoran Desert People, often referred to in regards to the Hohokam culture, are identified by their heavy use of irrigation agriculture, red on brown ceramics, shell working, and the presence of ball courts and later platform mounds. The documented historical record of the Casa Grande ruins begins in 1694 when Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino first visited the ruins and described the main structure with the term "casa grande" Spanish for "great house", which it is still called to this day. In 1892 President Benjamin Harrison declared the Casa Grande Ruins the nations first the first cultural reserve and in 1918 President Woodrow Wilson named the Casa Grande Ruins a National Monument.

For more information, visit Casa Grande Ruins National Monument.