372 Chapter 14 NATIVE ARTS OF THE AMERICAS BEFORE 1300A
fter witnessing the native ball game of Mexico soon after their
arrival, the 16th-century Spanish conquerors took Aztec ball
players back to Europe to demonstrate the novel sport. Their chron-
icles remark on the athletes’ great skill, the heavy wagering that ac-
companied the competition, and the ball itself, made of rubber, a
substance the Spaniards had never seen before.
The game was played throughout Mesoamerica and into the
southwestern United States, beginning at least 3,400 years ago, the
date of the earliest known ball court. The Olmec were apparently
avid players. Their very name—a modern invention in Náhuatl, the
Aztec language—means “rubber people,” after the latex-growing
region they inhabited. Not only do ball players appear in Olmec art,
but archaeologists have found remnants of sunken earthen ball
courts and even rubber balls at Olmec sites.
The Olmec earthen playing field evolved in other Mesoameri-
can cultures into a plastered masonry surface,I- or T-shaped in plan,
flanked by two parallel sloping or straight walls. Sometimes the walls
were wide enough to support small structures on top, as at Copán
(FIG. 14-8). At other sites, temples stood at either end of the ball
court. These structures were common features of Mesoamerican
cities. At Cantona in the Mexican state of Puebla, for example, ar-
chaeologists have uncovered 22 ball courts even though only a small
portion of the site has been excavated. Teotihuacan (FIG. 14-5) is an
exception. Excavators have not yet found a ball court there, but mural
paintings at the site illustrate people playing the game with portable
markers and sticks. Most ball courts were adjacent to the important
civic structures of Mesoamerican cities, such as palaces and temple-
pyramids, as at Copán.
Surprisingly little is known about the rules of the ball game it-
self—how many players were on the field, how goals were scored and
tallied, and how competitions were arranged. Unlike a modern soccer
field with its standard dimensions, Mesoamerican ball courts vary
widely in size. The largest known—at Chichén Itzá—is nearly 500 feet
long. Copán’s is about 93 feet long. Some have stone rings set high up
on the walls at right angles to the ground, which a player conceivably
could toss a ball through, but many courts lack this feature. Alterna-
tively, players may have bounced the ball against the walls and into the
end zones. As in soccer, the players could not touch the ball with their
hands but used their heads, elbows, hips, and legs. They wore thick
leather belts, and sometimes even helmets, and padded their knees
and arms against the blows of the fast-moving solid rubber ball. Typi-
cally, the Maya portrayed ball players wearing heavy protective cloth-
ing and kneeling, poised to deflect the ball (FIG. 14-11).
Although widely enjoyed as a competitive spectator sport, the
ball game did not serve solely for entertainment. The ball, for exam-
ple, may have represented a celestial body such as the sun, its move-
ments over the court imitating the sun’s daily passage through the
sky. Reliefs on the walls of ball courts at certain sites make clear that
the game sometimes culminated in human sacrifice, probably of
captives taken in battle and then forced to participate in a game they
were predestined to lose.
Ball playing also had a role in Mesoamerican mythology. In the
Maya epic known as the Popol Vuh (Council Book), first written
down in Spanish in the colonial period, the evil lords of the Under-
world force a legendary pair of twins to play ball. The brothers lose
and are sacrificed. The sons of one twin eventually travel to the Un-
derworld and, after a series of trials including a ball game, outwit the
lords and kill them. They revive their father, buried in the ball court
after his earlier defeat at the hands of the Underworld gods. The
younger twins rise to the heavens to become the sun and the moon,
and the father becomes the god of maize, principal sustenance of all
Mesoamerican peoples. The ball game and its aftermath, then, were
a metaphor for the cycle of life,death, and regeneration that perme-
ated Mesoamerican religion.❚ART AND SOCIETY:The Mesoamerican Ball Game
ART AND SOCIETY
14-8Ball court
(view looking north),
Maya, Middle Plaza,
Copán, Honduras,
738 CE.
Ball courts were
common in Meso-
american cities.
Copán’s is 93 feet
long. The rules of the
ball game itself are
unknown, but games
sometimes ended in
human sacrifice,
probably of captives
taken in battle.