New World Handball
"Mexico dig reveals whole old ball game."Article by Norman Hammond, the Times Archaeology correspondent 11th June 1996
Sacraficial 'Handball'
As Europe succumbs to football fever, archaeologists in Mexico are celebrating a discovery that pushes back the history of the New World version by several centuries. While soccer cannot be traced back beyond the Middle Ages, the pre-Columbian ball game is 3,500 years old.
Its oldest court may be the earliest sporting facility in the world. The Aztec game of tlachtli was remarked on by the Spanish conquistadors when they arrived in Mexico in 1519. Players used their hops, thighs and elbows to propel a solid rubber ball at speed, bouncing it off two parallel buildings that formed the court. Losers were sacrificed.
That penalty was also found among the Maya, who were playing the game before the time of Christ. Courts of that age are known from Belize, while the famous but later example at Chichen Itza has dramatic scenes of sacrifice that include beheading the losing captain.
Earliest Handball
The ancestry of the game had been traced back to 600BC, with the discovery of three courts in the upper Grijalva basin of Chiapas, southeast Mexico, near the border with Guatemala. But a new find in the region has pushed its history back another 900 years.
Discovery at Paso de la Amada, Mexico
The discovery at Paso de la Amada, near the Pacific coast, was announced at a Society for American Archaeology conference. Excavation of a large mound revealed the parallel structures of a court buried under erosion deposits.
Court Construction
The court was built in two stages, the first dating about 1500BC. The two mounds were 74 and 78 meteres(about 25 feet) long and 1.45 metres (4.7ft) high, with a playing alley between them 6.8 metres (22ft) wide. The construction is one of the largest ball courts known in pre-Columbian America.
Sloping "benches" on either side of the alley made the speeding ball shoot off at an angle, making it more difficult to play. Real-tennis players will know the feeling. It is calculated that 25 workers could have built the earthen mounds in 25 days of hard work. Wihin a century or so, the court was doubled in size by expansion of the mounds, although the playing alley remained the same width and was lengthened only slightly.
Ritual Space
Warren Hill of British Columbia University told the conference in New Orleans: "Construction of a ball court created an important public ritual space for the community of Paso de la Amada." He said that an emergent social elite could have used the rituals to assert a claim to power. Competition between different segments of the community, represented by their teams, would have unified separate groups while underlining the authority of the controlling chiefs.
Teams
The teams themselves probably consisted of four or five players. Maya vase paintings show two-a-side games on smaller courts than this, while the huge court at Chichen Iza, the largest known, seems to have accommodated teams of six.
The current Game
A version of the rubber-ball game still survives in Mexico, played on a court marked by lines on the ground. Although the elaborate costumes seen in the pre-Columbian art have vanished, the athletic poses of the modern players match those of their precursors. The new find at Paso de la Amada suggests that the game was important from the beginnings of civilisation in ancient Mexicc.
New World Handball by Norman Hammond, the Times Archaeology correspondent 11th June 1996
Created 19th June 2001
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