The Maya Ballgame

Introduction to the ancient ballgame

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0:30Copan, Mesoamerica, more than 2,000 years ago. An excitable crowd gathers around a packed earthen and stone ball court. Two Maya teams are preparing to face off. Their game plans are simple.

1:00Use their hips to keep a heavy, bouncing rubber ball in constant motion and strike it cleanly down the central alley of the court past their opponents to score, to win. We know this sport as the ballgame. Across the vast region of Mesoamerica for countless generations, the ballgame stood as a cultural cornerstone, woven into the fabric of Mesoamerican religion, politics, art and warfare. From early highland and coastal settlements to great metropolises like Chichen Itza and later the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan,

1:35the ballgame was a constant. So what was it actually like to play this extraordinary ancient sport? What do we know? Why did it become so important to Mesoamerican societies? And could losing really mean death? Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And today, as another football season kicks off here in the UK, I'm talking to Dr. Ed Barnhart, archaeologist, explorer and founder of the Maya Exploration Centre,

2:06about this ancient precursor to our modern-day ball sports. Together, we're travelling back thousands of years to uncover the story of the ballgame, both in the Maya world and elsewhere in Mesoamerica. We'll discover how it was played, how it evolved, and why a simple rubber ball became so deeply connected to the lives and beliefs of entire Mesoamerican cultures. Let's get into it.

2:34Ed, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Well, the pleasure's mine. I'm a big fan. And can we say, I mean, to talk about the Maya ballgame, I mean, can we say that this is the oldest known team sport in the world? Well, team sport might be difficult, but ball team sport, for sure. Of course, you know, the Greeks had their Olympic sporting events that were very military and they didn't involve a ball. You know, we see things in rock art that makes it seem like people are competing in some ways.

3:05But in terms of a ball, especially a rubber ball, absolutely. We had some versions that were in China. We had some versions that were in Persia that were balls. But those were like 500 BCE. The Maya ballgame goes at least a thousand years earlier. Wow. So that's how about back in time we can go. And do we have any ideas when the Maya ballgame enjoys its height? Oh, its height is probably the classic period.

3:36Though, I mean, the ballgame was very popular everywhere in the Maya world and beyond. Every century we find them, including Contact. Creation stories involve the ballgame. They are crazy for it. And you also mentioned something which seems really important to highlight straight away, Ed, and we'll cover as this chat goes on. We say the Maya ballgame first and foremost, but actually we should be thinking much beyond just what is known as kind of the classic, the ancient Maya, should we?

4:09Absolutely. Every culture that we know of in Mesoamerica played the ballgame.

Mesoamerican geography and the Maya

4:15Well, let's focus on the Maya first of all. And you mentioned that kind of the classic Maya period potentially being the high point. And can you describe, can you give us an idea of Mesoamerica at that time? Where was the Maya civilization located and whereabouts should we be talking? Well, we're talking about a period, if we're talking about their classic form, we're talking about 400 to 800, give or take a century. There's, you could read 10 textbooks and get 10 different ranges there. But the Maya are essentially, their heartland was and still is Guatemala.

4:51So the entire country of Guatemala was and is Maya. And then Maya civilization goes up all the way through the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. It goes over into the first states of Mexico that connect to Guatemala, which are Chiapas and Tabasco. Then it, further west from there, it becomes another culture. It's the Zapotecs and the Mishtecs. And then down towards Central America, you got them about halfway through Honduras before

5:22the Lenka civilization takes over. Do we call it all Maya because they all share a culture or should we just be thinking of one kingdom covering that whole area? Oh, definitely not a kingdom. I mean, at best, they were independent city states like the Greeks were. But they are a civilization because they share a number of key things, religion, their calendar system, their writing system, and of course, the ballgame.

5:52And the ballgame, exactly. So when exploring more about the ballgame, if you want to learn more about it, for you as an archaeologist, Ed, what lines of source material and what lines of evidence do you have available?

Archaeological evidence of ball courts

6:04Oh, we have a lot of things. I mean, we have hundreds of ball courts that we've excavated. We have the contact period documents. One of the only buildings in Mesoamerica that we always are sure we know what it is, is the ball court. A lot of other things, even pyramids, we say flaky things like, that's a temple where rituals were performed. But we know what happened in the ball court and they're easy to spot because there's a very particular construction of a Mesoamerican ball court.

6:37So the archaeology itself, do you also have any kind of written texts, any inscriptions? Can that help us at all? Well, there's tons of art that shows them kind of in a freeze frame, you know, diving for the ball and what the ball court looks like and spectators. We get a lot of color there. And the hyperglyphs do speak about it, but I don't know of any text that actually went on about the specifics of a game. We get its name. We know how central it is to their mythology.

7:09But in terms of explaining it, sometimes we don't get that much. The Maya are very prescribed about what they write about. And unfortunately, we have very little in the way of prose.

Rules and equipment of the game

7:23Gosh, I apologize then. I'm going to ask first and foremost, I mean, how much do we actually know about the ball game and how it actually was played? I mean, Ed, what is the limits of our knowledge around this and the actual playing of the game? Well, we have great Spanish accounts of how the Aztecs were playing the game and people in the 1500s. The caution for us archaeologists is that we know that the game was being played literally 3000 years before that.

7:53So is the one we identify and say, you know, the 500s in Maya Tikal, the same game that was witnessed by the Spanish in the 1500s? We have reason to believe that it was pretty similar. I personally am always thinking to myself, you know, look at the typical schoolyard court in the back. How many different games do they play there? They play football, baseball, soccer, you know, football to you.

8:23But there's, you know, I worry that we oversimplify our quest of understanding the game. But if you want to get into the rules that we knew from the Aztecs, there's a lot about that. I think, shall we start with that? Just to give us a sense of like how, at least from with the texts that survived, like the Spanish texts and so on, give us an idea of how this ball game was played. But with the caution that you've already mentioned, Ed, the fact that that's maybe a thousand years later than the Maya ball game and trying to figure out what are the kernels of truth? You know, what are the elements that were probably there, you know, many centuries before?

8:56So the court gives us a lot of information to begin with. We have this thin lane and then two out of bound markers. If you were looking at it from the sky above, it would look like a big capital I. And the action happens in the neck of that eye. And there's a center line on the court. The Spanish recorded that the Aztecs would paint a line across that. So you knew where mid court was. And all the Maya ones, we find a marker right there, a stone marker.

9:28So there's one thing already. We know they were teams and we know there was a a half line like tennis or volleyball. So those are the courts that back the the capitals of the eye are the backfield. If the ball goes out there, it's a point for the other team. So crossing the line is important. They can't use their hands or their feet. Really? Wow. No, that's tough. And and it's also the ball is a typical balls about six inches in diameter.

10:02It can be slightly larger, but these are solid balls. These are not like our basketball or soccer balls. If they hit you, they hurt. And so they wear pads. They have something around their waist. They call a yoke and they have sometimes we can see them pads on their shoulders and their knees. They're allowed to hit it with their knees and their shoulders and their chest. And the the best shot is with your butt. You swing your hip out and pow. Well, but they bounce much harder than our regular balls because they're essentially big super balls.

10:37So because they're solid, these things bounce very, very high. So do we have the balls surviving as well then? We have balls that are surviving. Yeah, we've got dozens of them. I'm not really sure exactly how many we have, but we've got them from all time periods too. We have a we have an earlier ball than we have a ball court. Wow. The Olmec had this swampy location that they were dumping ritual objects in at a site called El Manatee.

11:09And in the lowest levels of that that are like 1600, 1700 BCE, we found a dozen rubber balls. Now, frustrating, Lou, never found an Olmec ball court, but they had the balls. And they were from the region of Mexico where rubber trees was. So that makes sense. I'm glad you mentioned that evidence as well, because that also reinforces how the Maya ball game is in much more than just the Maya.

11:39You've already mentioned the Aztec evidence and the Aztec rules of the game recorded by the Spanish. Now we've gone back to the Olmec before. So that's kind of nice kind of sandwiching it all together. Ed, I'd like to ask a bit more about the ball court itself before exploring more about the game.

Ball court architecture and symbolism

11:53You've visited many of these, I know. But when you go into a ball court at one of these Maya cities, do we know much about the material and how they're made? Should we always be imagining kind of grand stone structures that you're walking through? They are stone built. Now, I have personally excavated one that was just nothing but dirt. So they can be very simple. I like, you know, there's a correlation to football or soccer. I love that the game seems to, there are formal courts and big spectator sports, but there were also little kids playing it in the dirt.

12:26So anybody could play it and people were constantly practicing it. But the ball court itself that would be like the showcase for a city, that would be stone built. As you walked through the lane where the competitors were, you'd see that the walls are sloping up from you. And they slope up, oftentimes to where a ring would hang out. And the ring would be parallel to the center line. And if you got that ball through the ring, the game was immediately over.

12:57And at least in the Aztec versions. And it's very, very hard to do. So it was high up, and even if you were throwing it with your hand, you'd have a hard time getting it through, much less with your hip. So there were these sloping walls on either side of the playing lane. I've heard things that say that the ball's passage up and down those walls and down to the other opponents was symbolizing the movement of the sun through the sky. So for the Aztecs, who were so obsessed with sacrificing so the sun would continue to move through the sky, that had that kind of sacrifice and war connotation as well.

13:36Just like our sports, you know, there's steeped in symbolism of war and fair play and competition. So do we see some of those hoops, those rings that the Aztecs have as kind of to score? Do you therefore see them also in the archaeology from Maya times, from classic Maya sites as well, Bennett? Absolutely. Most of the ones that I've encountered have the rings. Sometimes they're, those are the first things that got broken off by, you know, vandals and looters and things.

14:10So we, sometimes we have to piece them back together. Not every Maya ball court had rings. So that's a cause for concern that we might not actually know how they were playing the game, but a lot of them do. All the big sites had rings incorporated in their, their ball courts. Well, that begs the question is, Ed, do we think that there are other ways that a team could win the ball game if they didn't have, or if they didn't score through one of those hoops or the stadium didn't have it? Well, again, the Spanish chroniclers watching the Aztecs and the people in the Valley of Mexico said the teams had form up with front people kind of like forwards near the center line.

14:51And there'd be one-on-one, maybe two-on-two. And then the other players would be in the back guarding the back line, because if the ball went through the back line, that was a point for the other team. So there were defensive guys. It was very much like, you know, what we're watching in the World Cup now. There were, there was a, there were backs and there were forwards. And so the, the play would go, the, the guy in front was, you know, the messy. He was, he was the one who could make that shot and get it past them.

15:23Or also if the ball just kind of dribbled out and just stopped on your side and nobody could hit it with their hip again or their knee, that was a point for the other team. How many points you had to score? That varies. 20 I've heard, but there's lots of different versions. But if you got it through that hoop, the game was immediately over. And at that point, the, whoever made it through the hoop got presented to everybody in like a fancy cape with feathers or a mantle. That guy would be the hero of the game.

15:55Cool. Before we delve more into kind of the people themselves, the competitors, because, you know, the Harry Canes and the Raul Jimenez's of Mesoamerica and so on. I do want to ask a bit more about the archaeology of the ball courts, Ed, because you've visited so many. And I loved hearing about how they're almost kind of different levels of ball courts from, from place to place. It's almost like there might be a Wembley equivalent and then maybe an eighth division, smaller ball court equivalent at a smaller city elsewhere. I love the differences that you can evidently see in the archaeology surviving.

16:27Oh, they're, they are huge. It's one of the frustrating things about studying ball courts is they're great variation. Their orientation is different everywhere. I, as an archaeoastronomer, really want them to be connected to astronomy, but that's inscrutable. They aren't there. They could be in any different direction. They're not on cardinal or on a solar line. They're everything. They're also, some of them are huge. The one at Chichen Itza is so gigantic. It's actually unreasonable to think people even played the game on a court that size.

16:59And then some of them are very, very small. Tikal has five courts and the one that's in their main plaza is not that big. It's kind of small. So that is also interesting. So it's not one ball court per city. Certain cities in Maya times had more than one. Yeah. Tikal has this cool section where there's three of them interconnected. It's almost like a, like a racquetball court area. Kind of like Wimbledon. And it's to the Chichen Itza one.

17:29Is that kind of the gold standard when it comes to Maya ball game courts with its size monumentality, how much time and effort it would have taken to create it? It is certainly a huge monument and the largest ball court in the Maya world. It's not the largest ball court. There are some big ones over in central Mexico too, but it's so huge. In fact, that I think it was a, a area that ball game related rituals were performed like big dances and things.

18:00It would be, I'm sure they bounced the ball around in the court and there's a, there's these beautiful carved images on either side of the lane of, of teams connecting with each other. But practically speaking, the court is simply too huge. And the, and the rings are ridiculously high up there above your head by 30 feet. So I think it was a ritual reenactment place that used the ball court, but also talked about

18:30it in terms of their religion and creation story. And that's a tricky thing about ball games too, that, uh, we know they're being played, but some of these things that are sitting in the middle of a ceremonial plaza, I'm not sure that that was first and foremost, a sport court. I think it was a symbolic sport court that in the same way that Christianity does our, this is the body of Christ. This is the blood of Christ. We were reenacting our pivotal moments of our creation, pivotal moments of the Maya creation

19:05story involved the ball game. And I think that those ones in the center were as much ritual as they were sport. This idea that we shouldn't divide, we shouldn't separate Maya religion from Maya sport, especially with the ball game, because it's all, it's all very much connected. Kind of like, I guess, if you're looking at the Roman world and the circus maximus, how there'd be sacrifices and the like, or that kind of aspect, before you have the chariot races, you need to think kind of that similar merging together of religion and sport in the Maya world too. Absolutely.

19:35Great analogy there. And actually kind of keeping on those analogies, I remember going to Pompeii and going into the amphitheater there. And today you can see the stands where the spectators were all around and then the walls, and they're quite barren, the walls today. But hearing from people when that amphitheater was discovered, how they were covered in art and in paintings and in color and, you know, kind of that, that impressive part of the whole spectacle with most of the ball games. I mean, Ed, should we be also imagining, you know, these buildings, these courts that had

20:07rich artistic decoration along the walls as well? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And we know that both from Maya times and Aztec times, the, uh, uh, a specific priest, uh, Diego Duran went into great detail of how beautifully painted the courts were and how there were feather things hanging everywhere. And there was, there was art on every wall and on the floor. There were icons that identified the teams and each city had their own special way that

20:39they were doing it and their symbols of their team, just like we have mascots. It was there, there, there's a lot to compare between the two there and the Maya courts. They were, of some of them, we find their piles of rubble and, uh, and their sculptures are now, you know, dust. Copan's a great example. Copan has all along its courts lane. Are these macaw heads, full, big carved macaw heads that are looking down on the court.

21:10Do we have any idea what that's supposed to symbolize or is that just an artistic choice? Well, there is a lot of bird iconography at Copan. In fact, we thought for a while, its name is Shoupi and we thought that was bird gift for a while because shoe is a word for, uh, birds in general, but we've changed that name a little bit, but still the iconography is everywhere. It kind of felt like, you know, the insignia of the city being incorporated in the, in the

21:41building. And my last question, before we explore kind of the people themselves competing, because I love that aspect of this as well, the spectators and the people watching, whereabouts were the stands in these ball courts? They'd be above the lane. So there's that lane where they're playing the sloping walls up to the ring. And then there'd be houses above that on the building where people would be looking down. They probably looked from the end courts as well. Oftentimes the, the court itself, the floor was sunken.

22:14So you could stand on any part around it and look down at the action. And they're, they're usually right next to pyramids too. So it's possible that people were using the stairs and terraces of pyramids to look down on the game. Um, but is it also this idea that ball courts, they're normally quite low down. So, you know, to get as many people able to kind of watch from above, uh, as possible. Yeah. I mean, I think there was a practical element to that. It was also, again, a symbolic thing since the hero twins played their ball game against

22:44the Lords of death in the underworld. Oftentimes if, uh, if, uh, Maya cities being slick, they'll put their ball court at the lowest level and kind of sink it in to be a kind of 3d representation of that and their ceremonies.

Mythology and the Popol Vuh

23:01All right.

Mythology and the Popol Vuh

23:02Well, let's move on to these figures and let's start with these mythological figures that you just mentioned dead. So who are these, these twins that are so interlinked with the Maya ball game and that religious aspect? Oh, I, I could go on too long. Hopefully I'll, I can be concise about that because they're, they're thrilling. There should be a Disney movie about these guys. They come from the Maya creation story. Basically their version of the Bible. It's called the Popal Vuh. And there are four creations.

23:32We are beings of the fourth creation. We, we got it right. We're made mostly of corn and we're good. The third creation was people that got wiped away, but that's where the hero twins live just before the fourth creation, their deeds create a safe world that we can live on. So they are the children of another set of twins before them that were also ball players, their dad, and I guess uncle were up on the surface of the world playing the ball game.

24:02And it was making lots of noise for their downstairs neighbors, the Lords of Death, who invite them down to play a game against them and they lose and they kill them and they take their dad's head and chop it off and put it in a garden. And then they bury his body in the ball court and a princess of the Lords of Death sees the head, where the head was planted, a tree grows and the fruit looks like his face.

24:34And she talks to the face and it spits into her hand and it impregnates her because she's worried that her dad's going to find out she's pregnant by this weird tree. She escapes with the help of animals up to the surface of the earth and gives birth to the twins. Their grandma's still up there and she's worried about them. She hides the ball game equipment from them because she doesn't want them to meet the fate of their fathers. But a little rat shows them that the ball game equipment is up in the roof of the house

25:05and they start playing again. Same thing happens. They get invited down, but they're better and they're fast and they win the first game against the Lords of Death who say, OK, best two out of three. Stay in this little house that's supposed to kill them. OK, best three out of four. OK, best five out of six. They keep changing the rules because the hero twins keep winning this ball game. Finally, they realize the only way we're going to get through this is by self-sacrifice.

25:36So they derive a way where the Lords of Death can kill them, but then they'll be regenerated. And the story goes on from there where they ultimately defeat them. But this this pivotal moment twice, the first set of twins and the second set of twins is all about defeating the Lords of Death through a ball game. What a story. I mean, how do we know that? Well, it was written down by the Maya. They had it in their codices and hieroglyphs first and lots of pictures.

26:08A priest in the highlands of Guatemala saw Maya looking through this book and he said, hey, what is that? And they said, oh, it's our creation story. And he said, OK, let's write it down. And so they wrote down a Spanish and Kiche Maya version that was done in the late 1500s. And so that has been given down to us. So we have the very detailed account from from the 1500s. The real cool thing about archaeology was that that was just a story from the contact period.

26:43And then somewhere around the 70s, we started realizing that elements out of that story were in hieroglyphs and ceramics and carved on walls. Mike Coe put together this amazing museum exhibit where he put a bunch of pots together that were freeze frames from the entire story of the Popol Vuh. So we realized, hey, this isn't just contact period. This thing goes back now. I think our earliest evidence of the Popol Vuh is about 200 BCE.

27:15So hand in hand with the ball court. And once again, that's amazing because that gives you an insight into Maya beliefs around the ball courts, how the ball court is as old as them is as old as their gods, as these divine twins, who do they basically become gods of the ball game? Yeah, they become planets ultimately, but their heroic deeds are focused in their activity in the ball court. I appreciate if we're going more into theory now, but I love doing this once in a while, Ed, you have to indulge me. You know, before one of the big kind of ball game events back in classic Maya times, lots

27:48of spectators have come, the local rulers there as well. Maybe he's going to compete. We'll get into that. But you mentioned the religious aspect earlier, and then you've done that creation story. Could you imagine a place like Chichen Itza before the game kicks off that there is like a big religious ceremony to celebrate those twins and what they did and was kind of offerings to them happening beforehand? Oh, I think it would be just like our sporting events. People would show up and tailgate for hours before the game. And there would be probably, in the same way that our national anthems are sung out, they

28:21probably had rituals that would honor the deeds of the twins. Kings, as you just mentioned, are very specific, trying to put themselves in the place of the hero twins by showing themselves as ballplayers. They say, I am the protector of humanity. And there would probably be, on a game day, there would be lots of people coming into the city. There would be big markets. We know that the Aztecs had city teams that would play against each other. So, you know, on a game day, the whole community from the away game would be there.

28:59You read my mind for some of my next questions, Ed, because it sounds so similar to like gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, where you had away contingents going to an amphitheater, following their gladiators from their town, going to another town to compete. So it sounds like, as you were saying, in classic Maya times and Mesoamerica elsewhere, other times, you know, every city had their own kind of team of ballgame players that went around the nearby area to play, to compete. It was documented at contact with the Aztecs in central Mexico, and it looks the same with the Maya.

29:38Every big city has their ball court, and it has a different flavor, and we see it on Maya pottery. We see these, like, you know, wide world of sports diving images of somebody just barely getting it with their shoulder off the ground to save the ball. We see there's a great pot that shows people standing in the stands, and there's a referee there that it looks like a referee there. But two guys are talking to each other, and there's like little thought bubbles, and one of them's smoking a cigar

30:10as he watches.

30:13People always forget the referee, but, you know, there's always a referee at these things. There looks to be a ref in this one image. You know, it might not be, maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part, but he does look to be speaking to the players who are listening to him.

Celebrity players and betting culture

30:28Do you get a sense that people who became ballgame players, were they like the celebrities of their particular city? Did they gain big, can we imagine them being the celebrities of their day, having big followings of their own? Oh, absolutely. Duran was very specific about that, that they got money, that they got a nice house, but the thing they really wanted and got was fame, that they were honored heroes in their town. They'd walk around in those, you know how like golfers get that silly like green jacket?

30:58They would get this mantle that would be their gold jacket, and they'd walk around town and everybody would know who they are, and they were famous. That was the main thing. They wanted to be famous. And do we know who could become a ballgame player? Do we have any thoughts? Do we have any ideas as to, you know, who the players themselves were who were competing, let's say back in classic Maya times at a place like Tikal or Chichen Itza or Caracol and so on? Well, we know that the elites were playing it, and they were probably training their children in it, much another correlation to today that people with wealth get to be the ones in the rock star positions.

31:37But it was very open-ended. There were, you know, anyone could play the game, and the game was played, you know, in the back alleys of these cities. And a particularly talented person, again, I'm leaning on contact period statements. There could be scouts who would say, that kid's got talent, bring him to the palace. And do we have any names potentially surviving from classic Maya times that might mention, you know, one of these particular ballgame players that his name was then plastered around that particular city?

32:08Or is that information lost to us? It's either lost to us or sitting out in plain sight, and we haven't recognized how to recognize it yet. There's, you know, a good example is just, it was relatively recently that we figured out that artists were signing their work. Their tiny little hieroglyphs nearby them that are much more shallow were signatures. So, I mean, that one was sitting right in front of our eyes forever. So we might have some of that someday. I'll bring up one of the kings of Palenque, the Maya site of Palenque, was named Khan Balam.

32:47But it was a tradition that every king had a childhood name, and then when they became king, they got their new name. So his new name was Khan Balam. His kid name was Apitzal, ballplayer. So do we think, almost kind of a lead by example, that members of the royal family of these various Maya city-states, they were expected to be good at the ballgame?

33:17It was almost part of, you know, what they were as royalty. I think that's a true statement, probably. It wasn't a requirement, but it was one of those feathers in their cap that they were good. A lot of the images that we see carved in Maya world and spoken about in Aztec world, I keep cutting out the Zapotecs. The Zapotecs had tons of courts, too, and the Mishtecs, everybody did. But there's a lot of scenes that show a king or a noble playing a ballgame against a captive.

33:50They would get these captives from war, and then they would make them play these ritual games in front of people, where there was an advantage for the king, for sure. There's a story that Duran tells that Montezuma challenged the king of a nearby site, Teshkoko, to a ballgame, and the other lord won, and it bummed out Montezuma so much that he had him assassinated. Oh, my God. Which was uncouth.

34:21It was like a big story that everybody told, because what an outrageous thing for him to have done, to have killed him, when he bested him in a fair game.

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35:45Tell us about this. So fabulous. That would be another one of my all-time favorite experiences, was to be up there at the Pass, the Col de Traversette, near Monteviso. It was so extraordinary. Now, I grew up in Canada. I'm not too far from the mountains. I love the mountains. But this was unbelievable. And again, it's that idea of landscape, I think, is so important. The lay of the land. You know, going somewhere and seeing something gives you such a different perspective than just reading about it or talking about it. And to be able to go up to this part of the world where Hannibal may have crossed one of the passes where he crossed with the elephants, with all the horses, and to, you know, walk in his footsteps really tells you something about what an endeavor it was.

36:31What an extraordinary thing to have done at the time. Even the pass that we were looking at, the Col de Traversette, which people had been excavating and found some remains of a big army passing by, you see, in the 3rd century BC. So perhaps the first tangible evidence for Hannibal's army crossing the Alps. To find out if Eve made it down from those lofty Alpine passes and to listen to the rest of the episode, sign up to History Hit. There's subscriber episodes every fortnight and access to hundreds of original documentaries.

37:03That's historyhit.com slash subscribe. Or click the link in the show notes. That's historyhit.com slash subscribe. Now, back to our chat with Dr. Ed Barnhart about the Mesoamerican ballgame.

37:25That's also interesting, though. So it sounds like there are different kind of, almost like how the chariot race is in ancient Rome. You had, like, the two horse and then the four horse and you had, like, kind of different events. Does it sound like there were kind of the different events in the Maya ballgame as well? So, you know, solo king versus king, that Montezuma one you mentioned. But, of course, the mythology one is two against two. But can we also imagine, like, larger teams, like five against five as well? And, like, people were staying to see particular events that particular sports stars were best at? That's an unknown question, especially when it comes to the Maya.

37:58How many variations of the game were there? The Aztec ones that were recorded are fairly standardized. That, like I said earlier, there were forwards and there were backs. So some of these art panels we see where it's a king versus a king, we don't pull out and see whether there's a backfield. Maybe there's the guys on the back line who are just, you know, waiting to protect the king from losing a point in the backfield. But there were definitely different versions.

38:28There's, you know, we're going to get to that in a little bit. But there are surviving versions that have a great amount of variety.

Rubber ball chemistry and manufacture

38:35Yes, we're going to get to that. I mean, how dangerous was it as a sport? Well, the ball was an actual danger. Not Duran, but another Spanish priest that was witnessing a game in Central Valley of Mexico saw somebody get hit in between his pad that hit him in his belly. And they took him off the field, but he coughed up blood and within an hour he was dead. It probably exploded one of his organs. So that's how hard those balls were. You know, watching the World Cup now, it got me thinking, like,

39:08Did they ever do headers? I mean, was head cool? But you never see an image of anybody doing a header. And it's probably because these things are like the weight of rocks. You would get concussed if you tried to head this ball. How did they make the bulls? Great question. Well, first they had the great advantage of the rubber tree being native to their area. Not everywhere in the world has rubber trees. Now they're everywhere. But they started there. And so they had that latex.

39:39But you can't just get the sap out and turn it into a ball. That'll bounce for a little while, but it degrades. Basically, you need to kind of vulcanize it. In modern times, in tires, we use sulfur and heat. And we make a very durable rubber. We don't know if they were cooking the balls or not, but we know from chemically analyzing them that they have sulfur in them. And so they were adding sulfur to latex to create this very durable, long-lasting ball.

40:14We think they got the sulfur. I mean, you can find deposits of it. But modern folks tell us that they were using the juice of morning glory. Morning glory vines have sulfur in them. And I actually, I got obsessed with this and I made balls myself. First, I made like Christmas cookies that were out of this stuff. But I made the latex and the sulfur by ruining my garlic press by squeezing out sulfur juice out of morning glories.

40:47But I have a ball that's about the size of a baseball that I made 20 years ago. It sits on my shelf and it's getting a little flat there, but it still exists. And I made it just like the local Maya told me I could. Fantastic. I love how that's continuing down to the present day. You mentioned they needed padding, but that's on the legs and their hips. There's certainly no, well, from what is known, there's no padding on the head. There's no padding on the head. We never see anybody in helmets. And that one Spanish witnessed it hitting him like right in between the chest pads and the hip pads.

41:21It hit him in his gut and killed him. So, yeah, it's a dangerous game. The other danger would be betting. They were huge bettors on these games and the players were able to bet on themselves. And you could get into a bad losing streak where you lose all your money, your house. There were ones whose them and their entire family were the became the slaves of rich lords because they bet everything and lost. And do you get that from places outside the Maya world preserved in the Spanish text or is that also in the Maya world?

41:52Yeah. See, the tough thing about the Maya world, it was definitely doing the ball game at contact. But the Spanish sailed right by those guys. They didn't have any gold and they were these independent city states, which are very difficult to conquer. And so they sailed past him and found everything in the Aztec world. They went on for, you know, 10, 20 years before they really got back to beat up the Maya. And by then the world had changed so much. There wasn't a vibrant ball game happening in Yucatan that was recorded.

42:25I think once again, kind of bringing in the kind of the Roman examples, and we know that there's a lot of betting going on at those public spectacles. It almost feels like human nature, though, doesn't it, Ed? Yes, you don't have the direct evidence, but if the Aztec are doing it in their ball game, surely Maya spectators are betting, are gambling. Surely that's happening there with the Omec as well, the Zapotecs, you know, all these different cultures. It feels something as old as time, that human nature to bet on things like that. That guy sitting in the stands with a cigar so reminds me of that.

42:58He was like, you know, a big player. I got big money on the team. It's going to work out for me. There was a funny thing that was recorded by the Spanish, too, that the convention at the end of the game was the winning player, the nobles that were sitting up in the box seats were supposed to throw down things to them, jewelry, feathers, things of wealth to them. That was the convention. And if a noble was caught sneaking out of the game just before to try to welch on throwing things, the players had the right to run him down and tackle him and take the things off of his body.

43:36Can we imagine then that there was also some kind of the throwing of bread out and resources like that to the crowd, public spectacles, shows of benevolence and beneficence by the ruler who'd organized the ball court game for that day, kind of like to boost their own popularity? That's a good question. I am unaware of that one. I think that oftentimes the images and the accounts focus on what the nobles are doing and less of what the people are doing.

44:08So we get less of that information. But I wouldn't be surprised if a hosting city treated the people that came in and their own people special on those days. Feasting was a huge political mechanism to make everybody happy. The abundance of food being shared showed your wealth and kindness.

Captives, rituals, and human sacrifice

44:30We can explore further beyond the Maya absolutely now because I think it makes sense with the surviving evidence and then with the archaeology from the Maya. But Ed, you have already mentioned how there are stories where it is a king placed against prisoners of war. So do you sometimes get that dynamic, do we think, in these ballgames where you have the team of the city or the king and his best ballgame players pitted up against people who have been recently captured from a sacking of another nearby place?

45:04Yes, indeed. I think we do. And those poor suckers are put in the position of the lords of death and they are destined to die. And in those contexts, it is possible that those losers got sacrificed right after. There's a lot of nonsense that goes on about the winners got sacrificed. Number one, you'd never feel the team. Everybody would try to suck so they could live. It would just be a disaster. That makes no logical sense. It was an old guide at Chichen Itza who, just like eight years ago, admitted he's the one that started that lie.

45:37People just loved it so much. He kept saying it and they got famous. But, you know, there are contexts in which we see sacrifice related to the ballgame. I had a great one, if you want to hear a quick story of one that I excavated in Belize. I was the assistant to people who knew more than me. There was this swale on an island in a lake in Belize. And I honestly thought it was a trash pit, but my boss, Rob Rosenzweig, said, you know, I think that's a ballcourt.

46:10And I said, no, it's not a ballcourt. We went back and forth. I was obnoxious about it. But I said, okay, if it's a ballcourt, let's find the center line and let's dig right down to the middle. And there ought to be like a ballgame, a halfway marker. If there's a stone there, then you've got something. There wasn't a stone, but there was a body. There was a body buried right there, and we had all the skeleton, and then the skull was crushed. And so we brought this back to the lab, and it turned out that the skull wasn't even a skull.

46:43It was a turtle carapace, and the head was just gone. And going back to the Popol Vuh, there's a key moment in which one of the hero twins loses his head in the ballgame, and then a rabbit helps form a little gourd that makes a fake head, and they do a switcheroo and get his head back on. But this being beheaded in the ballcourt is steeped in creation story mythology. And here it was in this trash pit. I thought it was. It was a ballcourt complete with a symbol of the royal family.

47:15That's, remember, I said their dad's head was put in the garden, and his body was buried in the ballcourt. The last thing they do when they win is they dig his body up in the ballcourt, and they put his head back on, and they bring him up into the sky where he becomes the corn god. But there it was, this symbolism right there in a little, there wasn't even any architecture. But it was clear that that sacrifice element was part of the identity of ballcourts.

47:48What an amazing thing. So there you have kind of almost that combining almost, dare we say, of archaeology and mythology. I mean, it's very tantalizing. What a discovery. It was a great discovery. And hats off to Rob to knowing I was wrong about the trash pit thing. So in certain circumstances, we can believe that, you know, potentially theorize that the victims, the losers of a ballgame match would be sacrificed if that team are meant to be, are meant to not survive in the first place.

48:20They're not like the local, a team from the nearby city coming for a competition kind of thing. Right. The ones that, there would be competitions where the losers would be sad, but not dead. And then there were these ritual reenactment moments, which may have happened on, you know, an annual basis. We know that the creation story begins on, in our calendar, August 13th. So there could have been, you know, an annual event in which the king recreated the key moments of their creation,

48:53and putting himself in the place of the hero twins, and a proper sacrifice was made. Though the Maya were not so sacrifice-y, the Aztecs were very sacrifice-oriented and bloody. The Maya get kind of stained with that, like everybody in Mesoamerica was. Once they teamed up with Central Mexico, they got a lot more sacrifice-oriented. But the classic period, they weren't killing all that many people. Fair enough. But because we're talking about Mesoamerica and the bull game, we have to ask the sacrifice question.

Zapotec traditions and trash talk

49:24We've now addressed it. Sure, sure. Ed, we've done a lot about the Maya, and we've also mentioned about the Aztec. But as you've hinted time and time again in this chat, the bull court and the bull game, you know, spreads far and wide across Mesoamerica with these different cultures. Are there any kind of particular versions of the bull game from different cultures that you'd like to focus on that we should highlight? Because there's so many names like the Zapotecs, the Olmecs, Teotihuacan, and so on. Are there any that really stick out to you that we should focus on? Well, you know, let's give the Zapotecs a moment here.

49:57Let's do it. Because they have a very strong ball game tradition. Montiel Bon has a big court. There's an interesting site called Dine Zoo, which is early Zapotec. And it has a ball court. But the images around it are unlike the rules that we hear. There are guys who are holding balls in their hand. Balls that are like the size of a softball. And there are other guys that have masks on that look like a catcher's mask for baseball.

50:31Those ones are crazy. We see them throwing and holding the balls. And there's some with bats. So that one, I mean, what is the version that we're looking at there? Is that dodgeball? The neat thing is that the ball game still exists there. And there are people in the Valley of Oaxaca who play it as a sporting event, team versus team, city versus city. And in their version, they have a big stone paddle that's connected to their hand by a leather glove.

51:05And they paint their stone all nice colors. And then there's a ball about this big, which is solid, that they bounce. And so they hit it with this paddle back and forth. But there's still the center line in the lane. And it's five versus five. And to them, I've played this game with them. I've seen it. But one of the things that they do is a psychological element that we can't see in the archaeology. They like to do all sorts of jokes back and forth to upset and unnerve the other team.

51:38I asked them one time, like, do you ever do any mama jokes? They were like, no, mama jokes are straight out. Nobody gets to do any mama jokes. But they do things to upset each other, a psychological element to the game. That's got to be there as well. The sledging. I mean, the classic, whether it's cricket or football or anything. Even curling in the Inter-Olympics, right? You know, where the voices are raised against each other. You can imagine that happening back, whether in Zapotec or Olmec or classic Maya ball courts all around Mesoamerica, right? Are sports sports without the smack talk? I don't know.

52:11So it's always kind of like paddle or kind of like, yeah, almost. Well, first, it's kind of like baseball with a bat, but it's not quite that kind of. Do they bounce at all, the Zapotec balls? Oh, yeah. They bounce super far. They're those super balls. They're solid. So when they hit the ground, even when it's dirt, they bounce way up. And if you hit them with your paddle, right, you can launch them into the sky. And those ball courts, do they also? And also, sorry, I completely jumped the gun. When we mentioned the Zapotec, should we be thinking kind of central Mexico area today?

52:44Whereabouts? Yeah, Oaxaca, right? You know, Mexico's got that skinny part called the Isthmus of Tawantepec. Oaxaca is one of the states in that skinny part. So it's like very middle of Mexico, up in the mountains. And there, of course, they still have the big kind of round goals. Nope, they don't have the rings. In fact, the guys that are playing today and older guys are teaching younger guys. Nobody can tell me how long it's been going on in the Northern Valley is where I go at a site that's actually San Jose Magote is a 600 BCE site in Oaxaca.

53:21And from its big mound, you can look down on their dirt field. It's not formal at all now. It's basically just a big patch of dirt. And they paint the lines into it when they want to play. And then they rub them out again. But you can see it from... It's neat. I mean, the place, 600 BCE, you can be looking down on a sport that's still being played thousands of years later.

53:52I love that continuation. And I know Dan Snow played some Maya ballgame in Belize not too long ago, which was very interesting to watch. Oh, yeah, the Maya are doing it more and more. It started in tourism with the Maya, honestly. But now they're really into it. There's leagues. Yucatan has leagues. Guatemala has leagues. Belize. And so they're starting to play against each other. It's kind of beautiful to see this sport revive. And showing how the Maya are still very much alive and there and, you know, very proud of their heritage and elsewhere.

54:24This has been fascinating so far. I've got a few more questions. The first is we talked about the Zapotex, Aztecs, Maya ballgames, and the clear differences must have been between them. With the creation stories as well, did the kind of creation stories change? Depending on where the ballgame was being played, which culture? Because we've talked about the Maya one, but were there different ones for different cultures? There were. I'm not very acquainted with the one in Zapotec area, but the central Mexican one, which is shown in murals and art going back thousands of years or at least a thousand years before the Aztecs, talks about a different version where the ballgame has a totally different but important element in it.

55:09There's a part of that creation story from central Mexico in which a big mountain called Sustenance Mountain is the place where humanity is going to get corn from. And the water comes down out of the mountain, and it goes down in an underground, like an aquifer, and then springs up in a ballcourt. And then the water comes out of the ballcourt and waters the first fields, and they get corn. But the ballgame in that scenario is basically the vehicle through which they get their life-giving staple crop.

55:47All right, Ed.

The Teotihuacan ball court anomaly

56:07Te Tehuacan, amazing place. But why is this almost kind of the anomaly when it comes to the ballgame and ballcourts? Because they have done. And it is a crazy anomaly that, frankly, upsets me. I mean, it's impossible. They are surrounded in people who are obsessed with the ballgame. Te Tehuacan is a huge city of, you know, probably 100,000 people at its height. It's just north of modern-day Mexico City. Massive. Yeah, massive. Amazing.

56:37And it's a huge city. But it's out in kind of a highlands desert environment. So the surveys are easy. It's not in the middle of the jungle. The buildings have not been that torn up. And great surveys have gone on multiple times. There's no way we're missing the ballcourt. It's just not there. It should be everywhere. But it's not. And more frustratingly, there are murals that we found at Te Tehuacan.

57:07And one of them shows people bouncing a ball back and forth with each other. So they had it. But there's no ballcourt. Do you think a ballcourt could be found in the future nearby Te Tehuacan? It's almost like the anomaly that is kind of outside the main area, not near the pyramids and so on. Oh, further frustrations. Yes, there are. There are places that I would say are less than 50 kilometers away from Te Tehuacan living contemporaneously with Te Tehuacan with ballcourts.

57:42And so they on purpose don't have a ballcourt. You know, there's a lot of explanations. Perhaps theirs was, you know, a temporary court that they set up and then took down. Perhaps they played it a different way. Perhaps they bounced it off the sides of pyramids like we see in certain Maya images. So, I mean, I would say that it's not that they didn't have the ballgame. It's that we archaeologists haven't seen it for what it is yet. That's also a great point there, Ed. The fact that you have, you know, thousands of kind of these stone ball courts.

58:16Am I right, more than a thousand stone ball courts discovered so far? Oh, yeah. Over 2,000. And that's just what we've discovered. There are thousands more sitting out in the jungle. And to think, like, maybe how many of them were actually made of, you know, you say were temporary or made of turf and timber, which haven't survived or cannot be as visibly seen. You know, whether archaeologists have, they actually just scratched the surface with the multitude of ball courts there have been over the thousands of years in Mesoamerica. That's exactly what I think, that we're just not seeing the fullness in Teotihuacan and that there are still a ton of things that we need to learn about the ballgame and its evolution over 3,000 years, 4,000 years almost.

59:02So, Ed, how does the ballgame, how does it go out of fashion? Why does it go out of fashion? And it goes out of fashion because the Spanish stomp it out. The Spanish priests quickly realize how absolutely integral the religions of the region were to the ballgame. And so they ripped up the ball courts and they outlawed the ballgame because it was so connected to the religion they were trying to stomp out and replace with Christianity.

59:34And so for several centuries it's written about but not played and only more recently it's come back into life again. It's been revived. That's right. Even after they destroyed the ball courts in the contact period, people would still play in the dirt and on the run. They were kind of renegades but they, people were obsessed with it in the same way that we are obsessed with our sports. They did not let it go very easily. Even though they couldn't play on their courts anymore, they continued to play on the sly. And the evidence is still in places like Sinaloa, which didn't have anything the Spanish wanted, so they left them alone more.

1:00:12The game just perpetually survived there. Well, to finish off, let's kind of go back to the beginnings, which you mentioned in passing earlier on.

Olmec origins and modern revival

1:00:21And I feel we need to go back to it. With the Olmec, perhaps best known for the Olmec heads, La Venta and places like that. But you did mention earlier, Ed, how although there aren't any ball courts from that time, you have got the earliest rubber balls. So what do we know about this? This is amazing. That was a beautiful find. Archaeologists look for states of preservation and certain environments give them and certain don't. Over in Europe, you guys have those wonderful macabre bog bodies that fall into swamps that are anaerobic environments.

1:00:59And so just the oxygen gets sucked out and you still have the guy with what he ate for lunch in his gut. This was what El Manatee was. It was a swampy little area that's near a little hill called El Manatee. But as so often happens in Mexico, the story begins with some guys just trying to dig a pond for their cattle to to get water in. And they realize they're in this swampy anaerobic environment and Olmec wooden statues start coming up and skeletons.

1:01:35And so archaeology gets into it. But at the very lowest level of this thing that they dug out and prepared with whatever anaerobic anaerobic muck this was at the very bottom levels at about 1600, 1700 BCE were a dozen balls and they were preserved. So we know that this ball, at least if not the incomplete game, was there by 1600 BCE. And the ball has come before the earliest known ball courts from any Mesoamerica?

1:02:09Well, no, very close. And frustratingly, not the Olmec, but the oldest one is at a place called Paseo de la Amada in Chiapas. Like close. It's an area we call the Sokonusco. It's near the Pacific coast. But that one is 1650. Okay. My apologies. So it's kind of like one culture has a ball court. The other one has a ball. We didn't find any balls at Paseo de la Amada, just the court.

1:02:39And then we know that the Maya, that's so old, we don't even call those guys the Maya. We call them the Mo'kaya. But the Mo'kaya were trading with the Olmecs. So we know these two were associated. Again, it's got to be a case of just archaeology. The Olmec built their buildings out of earth, not stone. So probably their ball courts have melted away, or we just haven't seen them yet. So not a case of the Olmecs brought the bulls and the predecessor, the Maya, they had the

1:03:13ball courts. And then Eureka, it all comes together. Oh, we've got chocolate. We've got peanut butter. Let's put them together. It's that sort of thing. Now, it might have been. Who knows? I mean, that's, you know, that's the fun and job security of archaeology, isn't it? This has been really fun. I know we've covered a lot of grounds and, you know, gone from culture to culture, but it's still been wonderful to give us an introduction of the ball game and the archaeology behind it. Because you've been involved in so many digs around the bull courts, and we've mentioned a few like that skeleton from Belize. But are there any other finds very close to your heart, discoveries very close to your

1:03:47heart linked to the ball game that we haven't mentioned yet that you'd like to reveal before we completely wrap up this chant? There's a site that's becoming big news these days again, Tony Na. And there's a panel on the top of their, or midway up their pyramid, with two kings diving for the same ball. It's big. It's an exaggerated ball. But I love that one so much. Just it's such a sport image. And it looks down on their actual ball court.

1:04:18I love that one. But you know what, this week, I love seeing a globally recognized sport being played in a place called Aztec Stadium. I like to think that the Aztecs would be like, yeah, we made that rubber ball. Enjoy that world. Do you think kind of all that today, the fascination of the ball sports, but at the same time, the kind of the fact that archaeology and ancient history is reaching a much wider audience now, thanks to podcasts, thanks to YouTube and so on, that the interest in kind of these early

1:04:53ancient sports, like the ball game, interest in it, the fascination in it will only grow from now on. Well, I sure hope so. That's my whole business. Let's get people excited about the ancient past, right? That's something both of us are trying to do. The world, I would love to see outside of the Maya world, the first Maya ball game being played, but those guys don't care what we think of them. There's that Sinaloa has a big group of ballplayers. Oaxaca does. Yucatan does.

1:05:24Guatemala does. I dream of a day where these are actual televised sporting events. You imagine? And I think it could happen. And it may be one day in the Olympics as well, potentially. Wouldn't that be great? Ed, this has been such a wonderful chat. It's been brilliant to get you on the show. Last but certainly not least, you have got a podcast and a YouTube channel promoting all things Mesoamerica. All things Americas. I've got a podcast called ArcheoEd, and that one I just kind of tell stories off the cuff.

1:05:58And then I have a YouTube that's just archaeologist Ed Barnhart. Both of those I talk about things across the Americas. I consider myself an Americanist. So I try to talk about South America, North America, and Mesoamerica and those. But I have fun doing it. It's a nice outlet. And well, thanks for bringing it up. I hope some of your folks will give me a look. Brilliant. Ed, just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come and join us on The Ancients today. It was my pleasure. Anytime. Well, there you go.

1:06:32There was Dr. Ed Barnhart coming on the show to talk all about the ball game in Mesoamerica, both in the Maya world and beyond. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you want more from the Maya world, well, I've got good news for you. We do have a selection of episodes we've recorded over the years all about the classic Maya. We'll put a link in the description to two particular episodes, one on Chichen Itza, what we know about this famous site, and another on the Maya collapse, what caused this so-called

1:07:03collapse of classic Maya cities like Tikal just over a thousand years ago. We'll put links to both of those episodes in the show notes. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. And don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week.

1:07:33Sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.