The American Ballgame, Part 1
Most of the ancient world is a mystery to us. We unearth sites and name them for some identifiable feature, like a pottery style, and assume that people were born, lived and died there in isolation. When the population disappeared, we imagine another group just popping up somewhere else. The connections between ancient peoples are hardly comprehended. When Europeans first arrived in North America they found native peoples wearing Viking coins as jewelry, and a Polynesian style canoe was found in California dated to 500 AD. Polynesian navigators took American sweet potatoes to the Cook Islands and introduced chickens to American long before Columbus. Still, it hurts our heads to put this data into our linear understanding of history.
The recent excavation in Turkey of a temple complex dated from 11,500 BC nearly doubles the known span of such human construction. This is more than 5000 years older than the previously known freestanding human structure, and 7000 years older than the great pyramids. Humans have been living connected human lives for vast millennia totally unknown to us.
When I was invited to visit a ‘Mayan’ ball court in Arizona I was dubious. I have visited several ball courts in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, but those were Mayan lands. A ball court in Arizona seemed unlikely. What I learned made me rethink my poor understanding of life on this continent prior to the upheavals brought by European swords and disease.
The ball game is a truly American invention. Every ball game we play today, from soccer to baseball to golf, traces its origins to the Olmec people who lived in what is now central Mexico, along the southern shore the Gulf of Mexico, 3000 years ago. The game was so central that the name we call them, the Olmecs, comes from the Aztec ‘Nahuatl’ language meaning ‘the Rubber People.’ The game was both recreational and religious, and this should surprise no one who has watched soccer or American football, and been caught up in the near religious devotion of passionate fans.
The most recognizable feature of the Olmec culture is the ‘Colossal Heads,’ basalt carvings of the heads of rulers dressed as ball players, some three and a half meters in height. The stylized African-like features of these carvings have been noted by many. Ritual scarring depicted resembles that of the Yoruba people of West Africa, and the Olmec language was very similar to that spoken today in the West Africa nation of Mali. The significance of these facts is unknown. It is known that blacks are depicted in Mayan books. Franciscan friar Diego de Landa, arriving in the Yucatan in 1549, wrote that the Olmecs had traveled to the New World in ’12 migrations,’ and Mayan historian Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl, born in 1568, wrote that the Olmecs had arrived in ‘ships of bark.’
The Olmec civilization ended around 500 BC. Mesoamerican cultures such as the Maya, Toltecs, Aztecs, and others grew from the foundational culture of the Olmecs. The Olmecs were cultivators of corn, and the Colossal Heads were carved from basalt from the nearby Tuxtlas Mountains, the same basalt used for manos and metates, the tools used throughout the Americas for grinding corn into cornmeal. Trade routes were well established. In addition to basalt, they used jade from eastern Guatemala and obsidian from the western Guatemala highlands. The importance of corn within Mayan religion came from the Olmecs. Familiar Mayan symbols of creation and divinity began with the Olmecs – the rebirth of First Father (the Mayan Hun-Hunahpu) at the three stone place (representing 3 stars in Orion, and the center of the universe), reborn as the maize (corn) God, with corn growing from a cleft in the forehead, and the World Tree, connecting the earth and heaven. These were Olmec stories before they were Mayan. The Olmecs used a 365 day solar calendar, and may have originated the 5125 year ‘Long Count’ calendar, now thought of as Mayan, along with the necessary concept of mathematical zero.
And of course the ‘Rubber People’ originated the ball game, the first known ball court dating from 1400 BC. First Father had been a ball player. He had allowed himself to be sacrificed, only to be reborn as the Maize God, and the sun. His sons the Mayan hero twins were the most famous ball players of all. They prepared the world for the present age by defeating the power of self centeredness and conceit, and lifting up the example of self-sacrifice symbolized by their father. We are reminded of the Hopi hero twins, also charged with preparing the world for the emergence of man, who are also depicted as always traveling with the equipment of their ball game nahoydadatsia. As civilizations spread, the ball game was played throughout Mesoamerica, it was played in what today is Arizona and New Mexico, and it was played in Pre-Columbian Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the West Indies.
There have been more than 1300 ball courts found in Mesoamerica, and more than 220 ancient ball courts found in the United States. Next time I will write more on the evolution of the ball game and the ball courts, and especially what I found in Arizona about the ball game among the early peoples in the American Southwest.
I took this photo of the Wupatki ball court north of Flagstaff, Arizona.