The Precolumbian ballgame, played on a masonry court, has long intrigued scholars because of the magnificence of its archaeological remains. From its lowland Maya origins it spread throughout the
The authors of the papers in this volume venture interpretations that are stimulating to the active researcher, relevant to students of cultural processes. . . . I recommend the book to all Mesoamericanists.
—Ethnohistory
The Mesoamerican ballgame is well served by this thoughtfully conceived and carefully crafted collection of essays which will, no doubt, serve as a touchstone for future research.
—Latin American Indian Literatures Journal
This book holds great lasting value for the sheer number of courts recorded.
—American Antiquity
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Aztec empire, where the game was so popular that sixteen thousand rubber balls were imported annually into Tenochtitlan. It endured for two thousand years, spreading as far as to what is now southern
Arizona. This new collection of essays brings together research from field archaeology, mythology, and Maya hieroglyphic studies to illuminate this important yet puzzling aspect of Native American
culture. The authors demonstrate that the game was more than a spectator sport; serving social, political, mythological, and cosmological functions, it celebrated both fertility and the afterlife,
war and peace, and became an evolving institution functioning in part to resolve conflict within and between groups. The contributors provide complete coverage of the archaeological,
sociopolitical, iconographic, and ideological aspects of the game, and offer new information on the distribution of ballcourts, new interpretations of mural art, and newly perceived relations of the
game with material in the Popol Vuh. With its scholarly attention to a subject that will fascinate even general readers, The Mesoamerican Ballgame is a major contribution to the study of the mental
life and outlook of New World peoples.
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