3,400-year-old Mesoamerican ball court sheds light on origins of the game

Enlarge (credit: University of Oregon)

Millennia ago, a stone court would have hosted teams of players wearing belts and loincloths using their hips to knock a hard rubber ball toward goals at either end of the court. The ball game, which re-enacted a creation story recorded in the Maya religious text Popul Vuh, was a major part of political, religious, and social life for the Maya and the Aztec, and for the Olmec before them. But archaeologists don't yet know much about where people first started playing the game or how it became a cultural phenomenon that spread across the area that now includes Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Layers of ball courts

The ball court-a stone-floored alley about 50 meters (165 feet) long, bounded by steep stone walls and earthen mounds-once occupied a place of honor in the heart of the ancient city. But sometime between 1174 and 1102 BCE, the people of Etlatongo dismantled parts of the court and ritually "terminated" its life. That ceremony left burned bits of plant, mingled with broken Olmec-style pottery, animal bones, shells, and a few human bones (which may or may not have come from a later cemetery) scattered on the carved bedrock floor of the court and atop the earthen mounds that ran the length of its sides.

But beneath that 12^th century BCE ball court lay another, even older one, dating to 1374 BCE. That's roughly when (as far as archaeologists can tell from the available evidence) the formal version of the game-the one played on elaborate stone courts for crowds of wealthy, high-ranking spectators in major urban centers-was still being developed. Archaeologists Jeffrey Blomster and Victor Salazar were surprised to find a ball court so old in the mountainous highlands of Mexico instead of the Olmec-dominated tropical lowlands, where archaeologists have assumed the game got started.

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