Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If it makes you feel any better, it’s likely a LOT less time that that. They didn’t develop their complex social culture until ~750BC & the earliest sculptural examples of Maya script are ~300BC.
It’s extremely unlikely any books the Spanish burned dated back until then but that’s the likely earliest they would have been.
Still a massive cultural crime & attempted genocide tho
I have a feeling it would be tough to weigh where to keep things to 100% to what we know vs. filling in the blanks to make it more entertaining. Seems to have been going on during the olmec period too which would indicate at least around 3000 years of play... lots of different variations over that time. Tough to decide which one to pick.
This is what makes me very sad, for those trying to recover their culture.
For example, there are many Native Canadians trying to recover their culture and language, their history. And I wish them all success!
But at the same time, I often see such discussions talking as if that culture was static. Unchangeable. "This is how we did it", from elders, which barely remember anything other than the fading memories of ther great grandparents.
Instead, I hope that such culture can be brought back, but with an understanding of "what if such culture was not wiped out, but instead, stayed alive and existed through change to modern times".
An example would be food, and dance, and music, and stories. All of these would transition to modern mediums, and tools, and yet, still stem from the past, while simultaneously being influenced by the widening world, and expanded trade, and so on.
I think the greatest loss is not the way things were, past culture, because everyone loses that, humans always change, regardless of technology.
Instead, the greatest loss is what could have been today.
And I would love to see what could have been.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame
> The usual dress for players is known from iconographic and figural findings. These show leather protection mainly at the hips and the chest, but sometimes also at the knees and the arms, though very seldom at the feet. The clothing was used to protect against the impact of the ball. The protected parts of the body were used to strike the ball. Some players would wear head dresses (like deer heads) for ritual reasons.
I’ve toyed with the idea of plotting the era and location of popular TV and movie narratives. I think you’d find that most of them are very narrowly focused on a handful of places and times. This may not be a recipe for successful TV, but I would love to watch a TV show about the Maya or the Olmec or the Inca (or really any of the pre-Colombian indigenous people of the Americas). Like all people, I’m sure that these people had dramatic lives, but it would be all the more interesting because it would be a totally different culture. When you think about what modern civilization has inherited from these people—-agriculture especially—-it’s a shame that we don’t know more about them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKvQjgC9sIY
But as said in another comment, it's just an interpretation, it's really hard to tell if it's anything like the original intent of the sport/ritual.
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Here's an optimistic video about a different modern approach to what is known of the game:
It has been filmed in slow motion in this beautiful video.
According to Atlas Obscura,
The Aztecs continued this proud tradition of loser‐lose‐all, as many vases and sculptures depict the inevitable decapitation of the losing team. There are even some depictions of ball players playing with the heads of the losers in place of a ball. Whether this actually occurred is up to artistic speculation. The Spanish who observed the game reported horrendous injuries to those who played it — deep bruising requiring lancing, broken bones, and even death when a player was hit in the head or by an unprotected bit by the heavy ball. (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/meso-american-baseball)
It was a serious question. I see this "probably ritual" a lot when reading about old things. I get the feeling that this comes from some older Hobbsian "brutish and short" view of how people lived. Like "since they where not as advanced and smart as us the must have been half starved all the time and coudn't possibly have a ball game just for the hell of it"
It doesn’t imply any religious purpose. Lots of what people do in life is composed of rituals. Morning coffee ritual, for example.
And a coffee maker is not for ritual use, it is for making coffee.
Nothing religious or spiritual (usually), but you get a lot of time/structure/cycle/morning/sleep/work semiology out of the coffee ritual. In fact, this is so true that coffee as a beverage has adopted significant phenomenological value external to its utility due to cultural osmosis - we have very strong associations between coffee and a variety of abstract qualities: work, awakeness, sleep deprivation, productivity, etc. And, these qualities are quite different between cultures even if the actual raw output/process of production are pretty much the same for many.
Making coffee is much more susceptible to this kind of ritualmaking because of the implicit repetition, sequence and waiting qualities of the process. That said, there are people who engage with the process without any ritual - the patient in the dentist's waiting room who pops in a K-cup, the McDonalds worker who fills the McCafe order off a ticket, the spouse who runs out of tea and puts on a cup of their partner's coffee.
They very often do know what the object is used for. It just doesn't have any economic/survival significance. For example, children's toys are labelled ritual objects.
This sort bulk classification via jargon exists elsewhere in science. For example, astronomers refer to all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium as metals. Should we ridicule astronomers for not knowing basic chemistry? Or should we accept that different fields have terms of art/jargon which are very useful for communicating among colleagues and are not intended to compete with the general usage of those words?
Put yourself in the seat of someone coming to look at your house 1,000+ years after you died. Most things are gone but some things are intact. Our history and language was either wiped out or indiscernible. What would they find?
Well, in my house, here's a few things:
- they'd find that the softwood in my kitchen is much more worn than the rest of my house. We either spent a lot of time there or didn't care about it.
- they'd then find that there's bags of fragrant stuff by this steel machine with a pressurization cup that also has a steam wand.
- they'd find a water reservoir on the back of the machine.
- if I left in a hurry, they'd find cups scattered throughout the house, particularly in what looks like working areas.
- they'd find clean cups near the machine; some are plain but some are decorated!
Even from all this, they'd have to look at coffee beans to find out they're caffeinated, they'd need to determine the presence of sugar, spices, and the various types of milk humans use. The "morning coffee ritual" would still look pretty amalgamous, and lots of context as to what we did around it would be lost, but they'd get an idea around what it all was about.
Your own definition of "ritual".
I think that socratic contempt for religion used to be an absolute fringe. Only recently we can distinguish betwen scientific and unscientific. For eons, people, educated people, could only distinguish between traditional and weird.
That was their "knowledge" and they used what they had, because one needs to navigate their life somehow.
Every morning, the first thing I do after getting up is go to the bathroom. That is a ritual. Watching the football game every week--ritual. Making your cup of coffee in the morning--ritual.
The disconnect is that most people understand "ritual" to have a religious or supernatural component, which none of the examples I've given have. Archaeologists do not understand "ritual" to need this component either. Also note that it is easier to identify the commonality of an object and its associated context than it is to identify what the object is and much, much easier than identifying why it is used.
In the context of the Mesoamerican ball game, there is abundant evidence that it is a 1200-year-old version of the NFL, although the biggest difference from modern sportsball is that the players seem to be poorly paid (if at all) from their teams and are more heavily reliant on their sponsorship income.
https://onlinecampus.fcps.edu/media2/Social_Studies/WHGII_20...
I assume there would be some indicator placed next to a symbol around the edge but was a bit disappointed to see nothing describing it in the article. Maybe too obvious to state?
INAH's release: https://www.inah.gob.mx/boletines/con-su-texto-jeroglifico-m...
Chelsea - Ajax 4-4
Happy weekend everybody! :)
Seriously, it's not a scoreboard.