The month from September 15 through October 15 is Latino Heritage Month. I already investigated a little bit of Mexican history with my post on Luchadores last week, and today I'm going to keep looking into the history of sports in Latin America. In the region of 'Mesoamerica', which stretches from central Mexico to Honduras and Nicaragua, there are a number of giant, mysterious athletic stadiums where Mayans, Aztecs, and other pre-Columbian civilizations played what scholars have come to call "The Mesoamerican Ballgame". In reality, the ballgame was probably a family of similar ballgames played throughout the region that elements in common with soccer, volleyball, and racquetball.
The thing that most people like to fixate on when they talk about
the ball game is the presence of human sacrifice. I was taught in
school that the losers of each game were executed in a ritual sacrifice
to the gods. While that did happen, it happened more at the highest
levels of competition. Less high-stakes versions of the game were
played by women and children. The most interesting aspect of the
sport, for me, is the stadium.
Each stadium was different,
and the rock walls at ground level seem to have been used to bounce
balls off of while players attempted to move a ball to one end of the
court without using their hands--some versions had players using their
forearms, their legs, even their hips to move the balls, being
penalized if the ball touches the ground too many times. Today in the
Sinaloa region of Mexico, an adaptation of the Aztec Ball Game is still
played, making it the longest continuously played team sport known to
the world.
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