Casas Grandes (Spanish for Great Houses; also known as Paquimé) is a prehistoric archaeological site in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Casas Grandes consisted of about 2,000 adjoining rooms built of adobe, I-shaped Mesoamerican ballcourts, stone-faced platforms, effigy mounds, and a market area.

[6] Specialized craft activities included the production of copper bells and ornaments, extensive pottery, and beads from marine molluscs.

The archaeologist Stephen Lekson has noted that Paquimé is aligned on roughly the same longitudinal axis as Chaco Canyon and Aztec Ruins, with an error of only a few kilometres/miles.

Lekson proposed that ruling elites, once removed from their prior positions at Chaco, re-established their hegemony over the area at Aztec and later Paquime.

[9] At the time of the Spanish Conquest, the district of Casas Grandes was studded with artificial mounds, from which looters took numerous stone axes, metates or corn-grinders, and earthenware pottery vessels of various kinds.

The ruins were built of sun-dried blocks of mud and gravel, about 56 centimetres (22 in) thick, and of irregular length, generally about 1 metre (3 ft), probably formed and dried in place.

This visual structure defines the eastern side as lending toward the Puebloan peoples of North America and the west as referencing the cultures to the south in Mesoamerica.

[14] A major collection of Casas Grandes pottery is currently held by the Museum of Peoples and Cultures at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

Early ethnologist Hubert Howe Bancroft, in his The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America (1874), had alleged that they are related to the modern-day Hopi People, referred as "Moqui" during his period.

[16] In the case with the ruins found at Casas Grandes, iconography has proven to be particularly important in understanding gender differences, especially in regards to trade, daily tasks, and religious rituals.

[19] Contrasting specific pictorial representations of the effigies include masculine identified features and activities such as sitting with their legs flexed to their bodies, decorated with pound signs and horned serpent imagery, smoking, and their penis.

[20] Females in contrast have large midsections sitting with their legs extended, decorated with modified pound signs and bird imagery, holding children and pots, and occasionally nursing.

[21] The effigies depicted the way in which the Casas Grandes people thought social life should be implemented based on gender differences and provide insight on the simple aspects of society.

The archaeologist Charles C. Di Peso advanced the theory that Casas Grandes was a backwater until about 1200 CE when pochteca (traders) from the Aztec empire or other Mesoamerican states to the south turned it into a major trading center.

A diametrically opposed theory is that Casas Grandes was established by the elites of the Ancestral Puebloans from the north who were leaving Chaco Canyon and other areas during their decline.

The third theory is that Casas Grandes is purely a local creation, a community that grew over time to dominate its region and adopted some religious and social customs from the civilizations of Mesoamerica.

[24] Other theories are that the Casas Grandes people migrated west to Sonora and joined or became the Opata whom the Spaniards found in the mid 16th century living in "statelets," small but well-organized city states.