The Ancients - The Maya Ballgame

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

A rubber ball. A stone court. And a sport where the stakes could be life and death.For more than 2,000 years, Mesoamerican peoples played a remarkable ballgame that became far more than entertainment; across the Maya world, it became a spectacle and a ceremony with religion, politics and power at it's heart.Today, Tristan Hughes is joined by archaeologist Ed Barnhart to uncover the oldest sporting tradition in the ancient Americas. Together they discover how the Maya ballgame was played, why it became so important, and whether the most chilling aspect of its reputation was actually true: did the losers really face sacrifice?MOREChichén ItzáListen on AppleListen on Spotify The Maya CollapseListen on AppleListen on Spotify The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Produced and edited by Aidan Lonergan. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, plus early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Copan, Mesoamerica, more than 2,000 years ago. An excitable crowd gathers around a packed earthen and stone ball court. Two Maya teams are preparing to face up. Their game plans are simple. Use their hips to keep a heavy bouncing rubber ball in constant motion and strike it cleanly down the central alley of the court pass their opponents to school, to win.

We know this sport, as the ball. ballgame. Across the vast region of Mesoamerica for countless generations, the ballgame stood as a cultural cornerstone, woven into the fabric of Mesoamerican religion, politics, art and warfare. From early highland and coastal settlements to great metropolises like Chichenitsa and later the Aztec capital of Tenoctitlan, the ballgame was a constant. So what was it actually like to play this extraordinary ancient sport, what do we know? Why did it become so important to Mesoamerican societies and could losing really mean death? Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And today, as another football season kicks off here in the UK, I'm talking to Dr. Ed

Barnhart, archaeologist explorer and founder of the Maya Exploration Centre about this ancient precursor to our modern day bull spots. together we're travelling back thousands of years to uncover the story of the ballgame, both in the Maya world and elsewhere in Mesoamerica. We'll discover how it was played, how it evolved, and why a simple rubber ball became so deeply connected to the lives and beliefs of entire Mesoamerican cultures. Let's get into it. Ed, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Well, the pleasure's mine. I'm a big fan. And can we say, I mean, to talk about the Maya ball game, I mean, can we say that this is the oldest known team sport in the world? Well, team sport might be difficult, but ball team sport for sure. Of course, you know, the Greeks had their Olympic sporting events that were very military and they didn't involve a ball. You know, we see things in rock art that makes it seem like people are competing in some ways. But in terms of a ball, especially a rubber ball, absolutely. We had some versions that were in China, we had some versions that were in Persia that were balls, but those were like 500 BCE.

The Maya ball game goes at least a thousand years earlier. Wow, so that's how about in time we can go. And do we have any ideas when the Maya ball game enjoys its height? Oh, its height is probably the classic period, though, I mean, the ball game was very popular. everywhere in the Maya world and beyond every century we find them, including contact. Creation stories involve the ballgame. They are crazy for it. And you also mentioned something which seems really important to highlight straight away, Ed, and we'll cover as this chat goes on. We say the Maya ballgame first and foremost,

but actually we should be thinking much beyond just what is known as kind of the classic, the ancient Maya, should we? Absolutely. Every culture that we know of in Mesoamerica played the ballgame. Well, let's focus on the Maya first of all. And you mentioned that kind of the classic Maya period, potentially being the high point. And can you describe, can you give us an idea of Mesoamerica at that time? Where was the Maya civilization located and whereabouts should we be talking? Well, we're talking about a period. If we're talking about their classic form, we're talking about 400 to 800, give or take. a century. You could read 10 textbooks and get 10 different ranges there. But the Maya are essentially

their heartland was and still is Guatemala. So the entire country of Guatemala was and is Maya. And then Maya civilization goes up all the way through the Yucatan Peninsula and Mexico. It goes over into the first states of Mexico that connect to Guatemala, which are Chiapas, and Tabasco, then further west from there, it becomes another culture. It's the Zapotex and the Mischtecs. And then down towards Central America, you got them about halfway through Honduras before the Lenka civilization takes over. Do we call it all Maya because they all share a culture,

or should we just be thinking of one kingdom covering that whole area? Oh, definitely not a kingdom. I mean, at best they were independent city-states, like the Greeks were. But they are a civilization because they share a number of key things, religion, their calendar system, their writing system, and, of course, the ballgame. And the ballgame, exactly. So when exploring more about the ballgame, if we want to learn more about it,

for you as an archaeologist, Ed, what lines of source material and what lines of evidence do you have available? Oh, we have a lot of things. I mean, we have hundreds of ball courts that we've. excavated. We have the contact period documents. One of the only buildings in Mesoamerica that we always are sure we know what it is is the ball court. A lot of other things, even pyramids, we say flaky things like, that's a temple where rituals were performed. But we know what happened in the ball court and they're easy to spot because there's a very particular

construction of a Mesoamerican ball court. So if the archaeology itself do, also have any kind of written texts, any inscriptions? Can that help us at all? Well, there's tons of art that shows them kind of in a freeze frame, you know, diving for the ball and what the ball court looks like and spectators. We get a lot of color there. And the hyperglyphs do speak about it, but I don't know of any text that actually went on about the specifics of a game. We get its name. We know how central it is to their mythology. But in terms of explaining it, sometimes we don't get that much. The Maya are very prescribed about what they write about. And unfortunately, we have very little in the way of prose. Gosh, I apologize then. I'm going to ask first and

foremost, I mean, how much do we actually know about the ballgame and how it actually was played? I mean, Ed, what is the limits of our knowledge around this and the actual playing of the game? Well, we have great Spanish accounts of how the Aztecs were playing the game and people in the 1500s. The caution for us archaeologists is that we know that the game was being played literally 3,000 years before that. So is the one we identify and say, you know, the 500s in Maya T. Call the same game that we were. was witnessed by the Spanish in the 1500s. We have reason to believe that it was pretty similar. I personally am always thinking to myself, you know, look at the typical school yard court in the back. How many different games do they play there? They play football, baseball, soccer,

no football to you. But there's, you know, I worry that we oversimplify our quest of understanding the game. But if you want to get into the rules that we knew from the Aztecs, there's a lot about that. I think, shall we start with that just to give us a sense of like how, at least from the text that survived, like the Spanish text and so on, give us an idea of how this ballgame was played. But with the caution that you've already mentioned, Ed, the fact that that's maybe a thousand years later than the Maya ball game and trying to figure out what are the kernels of truth, you know, what are the elements that were probably there, you know, many centuries before. The court gives us a lot of information to begin with. We have this thin lane and then two

out of bound markers. If you were looking at it from the sky above, it would look like a big capital eye. And the action happens in the neck of that eye. And there's a center line on the court. The Spanish recorded that the Aztecs would paint a line across that. So you knew where midcourt was. And all the Maya ones, we find a marker right there, a stone marker. So there's one thing already. We know they were teams and we know there was a half line like tennis or volleyball. So those are the courts that back the capitals of the eye are the backfield. If the ball goes out there, it's a point for the other team. So crossing the line is important. They can't use their hands or their feet.

Really? Wow. No, that's tough. And it's also, the ball is, a typical ball is about six inches in diameter. It can be slightly larger, but these are solid balls. These are not like our basketball or soccer balls. If they hit you, they hurt. And so they wear pads.

They have something around their waist. They call a yoke. And they have, sometimes we can see them pads on their shoulders and their knees. They're allowed to hit it with their knees and their shoulders and their chest. And the best shot is with your butt. You swing your hip out and pal. But they bounce much harder than our regular balls because they're essentially big super balls. Because they're solid, these things bounce very, very high.

Do we have the balls surviving as well, then? We have balls that are surviving. Yeah, we've got dozens of them. I'm not really sure exactly how many we have. But we've got them from all time periods, too. We have an earlier ball than we have a ball court. Wow. The Olmec had this swampy location that they were dumping ritual objects in at a site

called El Manatee. And in the lowest levels of that that are like 1,700, 1700 BCE, we found a dozen rubber balls. Now, frustrating, Louve never found an old. Olmec ball court. But they had the balls. And they were from the region of Mexico where rubber trees was. So that makes sense. I'm glad you mentioned that evidence as well, because that also reinforces how the Maya ball game is it much more than just the Maya. You've already mentioned the Aztec evidence and the Aztec rules of the game recorded by the Spanish. Now we've gone back to the Olmec before.

So that's kind of nice kind of sandwiching it all together. Ed, I'd like to ask a bit more about the ball court itself before exploring more about the game. You visited many of these, I know, but when you go into a ball court at one of these Maya cities, do we know much about the material and how they're made? Will you always be imagining kind of grand stone structures that you're walking through? They are stone built. Now, I have personally excavated one that was just nothing but dirt, so they can be very simple. I like a, you know, there's a correlation to football or soccer. I love that the game seems to there are formal courts and big spectator sports, but there were also little kids playing it in the dirt.

So anybody could play it and people were constantly practicing it, but the ball court itself that would be like the showcase for a city, that would be stone built. As you walked through the lane where the competitors were, you'd see that the walls are sloping up from you. And they slope up, oftentimes to where a, a ring would hang out. And the ring would be parallel to the center line.

And if you got that ball through the ring, the game was immediately over, at least in the Aztec versions. And it's very, very hard to do. It was high up. And even if you were throwing it with your hand, you'd have a hard time getting it through, much less with your hip. So there were these sloping walls on either side of the playing lane. I've heard things that say

that the ball's passage up and down those walls and down to the other opponents was symbolizing the movement of the sun through the sky. So for the Aztecs who were so obsessed with sacrificing so the sun would continue to move through the sky,

that had that kind of sacrifice and war connotation as well. Just like our sports, you know, there's steeped in symbolism of war and, you know, and fair play and competition. So do we see some of those hoops, those rings that the Aztecs have is kind of to score? Do you therefore see them also in the archaeology from Maya times, from classic Maya sites as well, then it? Absolutely.

Most of the ones that I've encountered have the rings. Sometimes they're, those are the first things that got broken off by, you know, vandals and looters and things. So we, sometimes we have to piece them back together. Not every Maya ball court had rings. So that's a cause for concern that we might not actually know how they were playing the game. But a lot of them do. All the big sites had rings incorporated in their ball courts. Well, that makes the question.

Do we think that there are other ways that a team could win the ballgame if they didn't have, or if they didn't score through one of those hoops or the stadium didn't have it? Again, the Spanish chroniclers watching the Aztecs and the people, in the Valley of Mexico said the teams had form up with front people, kind of like forwards, near the center line. And there'd be one-on-one, maybe two-on-two. And then the other players would be in the back guarding the back line, because if the ball went through the back line, that was a point for the other team. So there were defensive guys. It was very much like, you know, what we're watching the World Cup now. There were there was a, there were backs and there were

forwards. And so the play would go, the guy in front was, you know, the messy. He was, he was the one who could make that shot and get it past them. Or also if the ball just kind of dribbled out and just stopped on your side and nobody could hit it with their hip again or their knee, that was a point for the other team. How many points you had to score? That varies. 20, I've heard, but there's lots of different versions. But if you got it through that, hoop, the game was immediately over. And at that point, whoever made it through the hoop got presented to everybody in like a fancy cape with feathers or a mantle, that guy would be the hero of the game.

Cool. Before we delve more into kind of the people themselves, the competitors, because you know, the Harry Keynes and the Raul Jimenezes of Mesoamerica and so on, I do want to ask a bit more about the archaeology of the ball court, said, because you've visited so many. and I loved hearing about how they're almost kind of different levels of ball courts from from place to place, almost like there might be a Wembley equivalent and then maybe an eighth division, smaller ball court equivalent at a smaller city elsewhere. I love the differences that you can evidently see in the archaeology surviving. Oh, they are huge.

It's one of the frustrating things about studying ball courts is their great variation. Their orientation is different everywhere. I, as an archaeo astronomer, really want them to be connected. to astronomy, but that's inscrutable. They aren't. They could be in any different direction. They're not on Cardinal or on a solar line. They're everything. They're also, some of them are huge. The one at Chechnica is so gigantic. It's actually unreasonable to think people even played the game on a court that size. And then some of them are very, very small. Ticall has five courts. And the one that's in their main plaza is not that big. It's kind of small.

So that is also interesting. So it's not one ball court per city. Certain cities in Maya times had more than one. Yeah. Ticall has this cool section where there's three of them interconnected. It's almost like a like a racquetball court area. Kind of like Wimbledon. And it's the Chichenitsa one. Is that kind of the gold standard when it comes to Maya ballgame courts with its size monumentality, how much time and effort it would have taken to create it? it is certainly a huge monument and the largest ball court in the Maya world. It's not the largest ball court. There are some big ones over in central Mexico too. But it's so huge, in fact, that I think it was a area that ball game related rituals were performed, like big dances and things. It would be, I'm sure they bounced the ball around in the court and there's these beautiful carved images on either side of the lane of teams connecting with each other. But practically speaking, the court is

simply too huge. And the rings are ridiculously high up. They're above your head by 30 feet. So I think it was a ritual reenactment place that used the ball court, but also talked about it in terms of their religion and creation story. And that's a tricky thing about ball games, too. that we know they're being played, but some of these things that are sitting in the middle of a ceremonial plaza, I'm not sure that that was first and foremost a sport court. I think it was a symbolic sport court that in the same way that Christianity does our, this is the body of Christ, this is the blood of Christ,

we were reenacting our pivotal moments of our creation. Pivotal moments of the Maya creation story involved the ballgame. And I think that those ones in the center were as much ritual as they were sport. This idea that we shouldn't divide, we shouldn't separate Maya religion from Maya sport, especially with the ballgame, because it's all very much connected. I guess if you're looking at the Roman world and the circus maximus, how there be sacrifices and the like or that kind of aspect before you have the chariot races, you need to think kind of that similar merging together of religion and sport in the Maya world too. Absolutely. great analogy there. And actually, kind of keeping on those analogies, I remember going to Pompeii and going

into the amphitheater there. And today, you can see the stands where the spectators were all around and then the walls, and they're quite barren the walls today. But hearing from people when that amphitheater was discovered how they were covered in art and in paintings and in color and, you know, kind of that impressive part of the whole spectacle, with most of the ball games, I mean, Ed, should we be also imagining, you know, these buildings, these courts that had rich artistic decoration along the walls as well. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And we know that both from Maya times and aspect times.

A specific priest, Diego Duran, went into great detail of how beautifully painted the courts were and how there were feather things hanging everywhere. And there was art on every wall and on the floor. There were icons that identified the teams. And each city had their own special way that they were doing it and their symbols of their team. Just like we have mascots, it was there, there's a lot to compare between the two there. And the Maya courts, they were, some of them we find their piles of rubble and, and their sculptures are now, you know, dust. Copon's a great example. Copon has, all along its court's lane, are these macaw heads, full big, carved macaw heads that are looking down on the court.

Do we have any idea what that's supposed to symbolize or is just an artistic choice? Well, there is a lot of bird iconography at Copon. In fact, we thought for a while, its name is Shoe P, and we thought that was bird gift for a while, because shoe is a word for birds in general. But we've changed that name a little bit. But still the iconography is everywhere. It kind of felt like the insignia of the city being incorporated in the building. And my last question before we explore kind of the people themselves competing,

because I love that aspect of this as well. The spectators, Ed, the people watching, whereabouts were the stands in these ballcots? They'd be above the lane. So there's that lane where they're playing, the sloping walls up to the ring, and then there'd be houses above that on the building where people would be looking down. They probably looked from the end courts as well. Oftentimes the court itself, the floor was sunken so you could stand on any part around it and look down at the action. And they're usually right next to pyramids too, so it's possible that people were using the stairs and, terraces of pyramids to look down on the game.

But is it also this idea that ball courts, they're normally quite low down, so to get as many people able to kind of watch from above as possible? Yeah, I mean, I think there was a practical element to that. It was also, again, a symbolic thing since the hero twins played their ball game against the Lords of Death in the underworld. Oftentimes, if Maya cities being slick, they'll put their ball court at the lowest level and kind of sink it in to be a kind of 3D representation of that in their ceremonies. All right, well, let's move on to these figures.

And let's start with these mythological figures that you just mentioned, Ed. So who are these twins that are so interlinked with the Maya ballgame in that religious aspect? Oh, I could go on too long. Hopefully I'll, I can be concise about that. Because they're thrilling. There should be a Disney movie about these guys. They come from the Maya creation story. Basically, their version of the Bible.

It's called the Popul Vu. And there are four creations. We are beings of the fourth creation. We got it right. We're made mostly of corn and we're good. The third creation was people that got wiped away, but that's where the hero twins live. Just before the fourth creation, their deeds create a safe world that we can live on. So they are the children of another set of twins before them that were also ballplayers.

Their dad and I guess uncle were up on the surface of the world playing the ball game and it was making lots of noise for their downstairs neighbors, the Lords of Death, who invite them down to play a game against them and they lose and they kill them. And they take their dad's head and chop it off and put it in a garden and then they bury his body in the ball court. And a princess of the lords of death sees this head. Where the head was planted, a tree grows.

And the fruit looks like his face. And she talks to the face and it spits into her hand and it impregnates her. Because she's worried that her dad's going to find out she's pregnant by this weird tree. She escapes with the help of animals. up to the surface of the earth and gives birth to the twins. Their grandma's still up there, and she's worried about them.

She hides the ballgame equipment from them because she doesn't want them to meet the fate of their fathers. But a little rat shows them that the ball game equipment is up in the roof of the house. And they start playing again. Same thing happens. They get invited down, but they're better, and they're fast. And they win the first game against the Lords of Death who say, okay, best two out of three. Stay in this little house that's supposed to kill them, doesn't.

Okay, best three out of four. Okay, best five out of six. They keep changing the rules because the hero twins keep winning this ball game. Finally, they realize the only way we're going to get through this is by self-sacrifice. So they derive a way where the lords of death can kill them, but then they'll be regenerated. And the story goes on from there where they ultimately. defeat them, but this pivotal moment twice, the first set of twins and the second set of twins, is all about defeating the Lords of Death through a ballgame. What a story, but I mean, how do we

know that? Well, it was written down by the Maya. They had it in their codices in hieroglyphs first and lots of pictures. A priest in the highlands of Guatemala saw Maya looking through this book. and he said, hey, what is that? And they said, oh, it's our creation story. And he said, okay, let's write it down. And so they wrote down a Spanish and quiche Maya version that was done in the late 1500s. And so that has been given down to us. So we have the very detailed account from from the 1500s. The real cool thing about archaeology was that that was just a story from the contact period. And then, And somewhere around the 70s, we started realizing that elements out of that story were in hieroglyphs and ceramics and carved on walls. Mike Co. put together this amazing museum exhibit where he put a bunch of pots together that were freeze frames from the entire story of the Popul Vue. So we realized, hey, this isn't just contact period. This thing goes back. Now, I think our earliest evidence of the Popul Vue is about 200.

B.C.E. So hand in hand with the ball court. And once again, that's amazing because that gives you an insight into Maya beliefs around the ball courts, how the ball court is as old as them is as old as their gods as these divine twins who do they basically become gods of the ballgame? Yeah. They become planets ultimately, but their heroic deeds are focused in their activity in the ball court. I appreciate if we're going more into theory now, but I love doing this once in the royal lady you have to indulge me. You know, before one of the big kind of ballgame events back in classic Maya times,

lots of spectators have come, the local rulers there as well, maybe he's going to compete, we'll get into that. But you mentioned the religious aspect earlier, and then you've done that creation story. Could you imagine at a place like Chichenitsa before the game kicks off that there is like a big religious ceremony to celebrate those twins and what they did, and was kind of offerings to them happening beforehand? Oh, I think it would be just like our sporting events. people would show up and tailgate for hours before the game.

And there would be probably in the same way that our national anthems are sung out. They probably had rituals that would honor the deeds of the twins. Kings, as you just mentioned, are very specific trying to put themselves in the place of the hero twins by showing themselves as ballplayers. They say, I am the protector of humanity. And there would probably be, on a game day, there would be lots of people come. coming into the city. There would be big, big markets. We know that the Aztecs had city teams that would play against each other. So, you know, on a game day, the whole community from the away game would be there. You read my mind for some of my next questions, Ed, because it

sounds so similar to like gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, where you had away contingents going to an amphitheater, following their gladiators from their town, going to another town to compete. So it sounds like, as you were saying, in classic Maya times and Mesoamerica elsewhere, other times, you know, every city had their own kind of team of ballgame players that went around the nearby area to play, to compete. It was documented at contact with the Aztecs in Central Mexico. And it looks the same with the Maya. Every big city has their ball court and it has a different flavor and we see it on Maya pottery. We see these like, you know, wide world of sports diving images of somebody just barely getting it with their shoulder off the ground to save the

ball. We see there's a great pot that shows people standing in the stands and there's a referee there, that it looks like a referee there, but two guys are talking to each other and there's like little thought bubbles. And one of them's smoking a cigar as he watches. People always forget the referee, but there's always a referee at these things. There looks to be a ref in this one image. It might not be, maybe that's just wishful thinking on my part, but he does look to be speaking to the players who are listening to him. Do you get a sense that people who became ballgame players, were they like the celebrities of their particular city? Did they gain big, can we imagine them being the celebrities of their day, having big followings of their own?

Oh, absolutely. Duran was very specific about that, that they got money, that they got a nice house, but the thing they really wanted and got was fame. That they were honored heroes in their town. They'd walk around in those, you know how like golfers get that silly, like green jacket, they would get this mantle that would be their gold jacket. And they'd walk around town and everybody would know who they are and they were famous. That was the main thing. They wanted to be famous. And do we know who could become a ballgame player? Do we have any thoughts? Do we have any ideas as to, you know, who the players themselves were who were competing,

let's say, back in classic Maya times at a place like Tikal or Chichinica or Caracol and so on? well we know that the elites were playing it and they were probably training their children in it much another correlation to today that people with wealth get to be the ones in the rock star positions but it was very open-ended there were you know anyone could play the game

and the game was played you know in the back alleys of these cities and a particularly talented person again I'm leaning on contact period statements there could be scouts who would say that kid's got talent, bring them to the palace. And do we have any names potentially surviving from Classic Meyer Times that might mention, you know, one of these particular ballgame players, that his name was then plastered around

that particular city, or is that information lost to us? It's either lost to us or sitting out in plain sight, and we haven't recognized how to recognize it yet. There's, you know, a good example is just, it was relatively recently that we figured out that artists were signing their work. Their tiny little hieroglyphs nearby them that are much more shallow were signatures. So, I mean, that one was sitting right in front of our eyes forever. So we might have some of that someday.

I'll bring up one of the kings of Palanke, the Maya site of Palenke, was named Kan Balam. But it was a tradition that every king had a childhood name, and then when they became king, they got their new name. So his new name was Khan Balam. His kid name was Ah, Pizal, ballplayer. So do we think almost kind of a lead by example that members of the royal family of these various Maya city states, they were expected to be good at the ballgame. It was almost part of, you know, what they were as royalty. I think that's a, that's a, that's a, statement. Probably. It wasn't a requirement, but it was one of those feathers in their cap that they were good. A lot of the images that we see carved in Maya world and spoken about in Aztec world,

I keep cutting out the Zapotex. The Zapotex had tons of courts too, and the Michecs, everybody did. But there's a lot of scenes that show a king or a noble playing a ballgame against a captive. They would get these captives from war, and then they would make them play these ritual games in front of people, where there was an advantage for the king, for sure. There's a story that Duran tells that Montezuma challenged the king of a nearby site Teshko to a ball game, and the other lord won, and it bummed out Montezuma so much that he had him assassinated, which was uncouth. It was like a big story that everybody told, because Because what an outrageous thing for him to have done to have killed him when he bested him in a fair game.

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That's historyhit.com slash subscribe. Or click the link in the show notes. That's history hit.com slash subscribe. Now, back to our chat with Dr. Ed Barnhart about the Mesoamerican ballgame. That's also interesting though. So it sounds like there are different kind of, almost like how the chariot race is in ancient Rome. You have about the two horse and then the four horse and you had that kind of different events. Does it sound like there were kind of the different events in the Maya ball game as well?

you know, solo king versus king that Montezuma one you mentioned. But of course, the mythology one is two against two. But could we also imagine like larger teams like five against five as well? And like people were staying to see particular events that particular sports stars were best at. That's an unknown question, especially when it comes to the mile. How many variations of the game were there? The Aztec ones that were recorded are fairly standardized that like I said earlier, there were forwards and there were backs. So some of these art panels we see where it's a king versus a king, we don't pull out and see whether there's a backfield.

Maybe there's the guys on the back line who are just, you know, waiting to protect the king from losing a point in the backfield. But there were definitely different versions. There's, you know, we're going to get to that in a little bit, but there are surviving versions that have a great amount of variety. Yes, we're going to get to that. I mean, but how dangerous was it? as a sport? Well, the ball was an actual danger. Not Duran, but another Spanish priest that was

witnessing a game in Central Valley of Mexico saw somebody get hit in between his pad that hit him in his belly. And they took him off the field, but he coughed up blood and within an hour he was dead. It probably exploded one of his organs. So that's how hard those balls were. Yeah, watching the World Cup now, It got me thinking, like, did they ever do headers? I mean, was head cool? But you never see an image of anybody doing a header. And it's probably because these things are like the weight of rocks. You would get concussed if you tried to head this ball.

How did they make the bulls? Great question. Well, first they had the great advantage of the rubber tree being native to their area. Not everywhere in the world has rubber trees. Now they're everywhere. But they started there. And so they had that latex. But you can't just get the sap out and turn it into a ball.

That'll bounce for a little while, but it degrades. Basically, you need to kind of vulcanize it. In modern times and tires, we use sulfur and heat, and we make a very durable rubber. We don't know if they were cooking the balls or not, but we know from chemically analyzing them that they have sulfur in them. And so they were adding sulfur to latex to create this very durable, long-lasting ball. We think they got the sulfur. I mean, you can find deposits of it. But modern folks tell us that they were using the juice of morning glory.

Morning glory vines have sulfur in them. And I actually, I got obsessed with this and I made balls myself. I made, first I made like Christmas cookies that were out of this stuff, but I made the latex and the sulfur by ruining my garlic press by squeezing out sulfur juice out of morning glories. But I have a ball that's about the size of a baseball that I made 20 years ago. Oh. It sits on my shelf and it's getting a little flat there, but it still exists. And I made it just like the local Maya told me I could. Fantastic.

I love how that's continuing down to the present day. You mentioned they needed padding, but that's on the legs and their hips. There's certainly no, well, from what is known, there's no padding on the head. There are no padding on the head. We never see anybody in helmets. And that one Spanish witnessed, it hitting him right in between the chest pads and the hip pads, it hit him in his gut and killed him. So, yeah, it's a dangerous game. The other danger would be betting.

They were huge betters on these games, and the players were able to bet on themselves. themselves. And you could get into a bad losing streak where you lose all your money, your house. There were ones who, them and their entire family were the, became the slaves of rich lords, because they bet everything and lost. And do you get that from places outside the Maya world preserved in the Spanish text, or is that also in the Maya world? Yeah, see, the tough thing about the Maya world, it was definitely doing the ballgame at contact. But the Spanish sailed right by those guys. They didn't have any gold and they were these independent city states, which are very difficult to conquer. And so they sailed past him and found

everything in the Aztec world. They went on for, you know, 10, 20 years before they really got back to beat up the Maya. And by then, the world had changed so much. There wasn't a vibrant ballgame happening in Yucatan that was recorded. I think once again, kind of bring in the Roman examples, and we know that there's a lot of betting going on at those public spectacles. It almost feels like human nature, though, doesn't it, Ed? Yes, you don't have the direct evidence. But if the Aztec are doing it in their ballgame, surely Maya spectators are betting, are gambling.

Surely that's happening there with the Omec as well, the Zapotex, you know, all these different cultures. It feels something as old as time, that human nature to bet on things like that. That guy sitting in the stands with a cigar so reminds me of that. He was like, you know, a big player. I got big money on the team. It's going to work out for me. me. There was a funny thing that was recorded by the Spanish too that the convention at the end of the game

was the winning player, the nobles that were sitting up in the box seats, were supposed to throw down things to them, jewelry, feathers, things of wealth to them. That was the convention. And if a noble was caught sneaking out of the game just before to try to welch on throwing things, the players have the right to run them down and tackle him and take the things off of his body. Can we imagine then that there was also some kind of the throwing of bread out and resources like that to the crowd, public spectacles, shows of benevolence and beneficence by the ruler who would organize the ball court game for that day, kind of like to boost their own popularity? That's a good question. I'm unaware of that one. I think that oftentimes the,

images and the accounts, focus on what the nobles are doing and less of what the people are doing. So we get less of that information. But I wouldn't be surprised if a hosting city treated the people that came in and their own people special on those days. Feasting was a huge political mechanism to make everybody happy. The abundance of food being shared was, you know, showed your wealth and kindness. We can explore further beyond the Maya absolutely now because I think it makes sense with the surviving evidence and then with the archaeology from the Maya. But Ed, you have already mentioned how there are stories where it is a king placed against prisoners of war.

So do you sometimes get that dynamic, do we think, in these ball games where you have the team of the city or the king and his best ballgame players pitted up against people who have been recently. captured from a, you know, sacking of another nearby place? Yes, indeed. I think we do. And those poor suckers are put in the position of the lords of death and they are destined to die. And in those contexts, it is possible that those losers got sacrificed right after. There's a lot of nonsense that goes on about the winners got sacrificed. Number one, you'd never feel the team if, you know, everybody would try to suck so they could live. It would just be a disaster. That makes no logical. sense. It was an old guide at Chechnica who just like eight years ago admitted he's the one that

started that lie. People just loved it so much. He kept saying it and they got famous. But, you know, there are contexts in which we see sacrifice related to the ballgame. I had a great one if you want to hear a quick story of one that I excavated in Belize. I was the assistant to people who knew more than me. there was this swale on an island in a lake in Belize. And I honestly thought it was a trash pit, but my boss, Rob Rosenzwig, said, you know, I think that's a ball court. And I said, no, it's not a ball court.

We went back and forth. I was obnoxious about it. But I said, okay, if it's a ball court, let's find the center line and let's dig right down to the middle. And there ought to be like a ball game, a halfway marker. If there's a stone there, then you've got something. There wasn't a stone, but there was a body. There was a body buried right there, and we had all the skeleton, and then the skull was

crushed. And so we brought this back to the lab, and it turned out that the skull wasn't even a skull. It was a turtle carapace, and the head was just gone. And going back to the Popul Voo, there's a key moment in which one of the hero twins loses his head in the ball game, and then a rabbit helps form a little gourd that makes a fake head and they do a switcheroo and get his head back on. But this being beheaded in the ball court is steeped in creation story mythology. And here it was in this trash pit, I thought it was. It was a ball court complete with a symbol of the royal family. That's, remember, I said, their dad's head was put in a garden and his body was buried in the ball court. The last thing they do when they win is they dig his body up in the ball court and they put his head back on and they bring him up into the sky where he becomes the corn god.

But there was this symbolism right there in a little, there wasn't even any architecture. But it was clear that that sacrifice element was part of the identity of ball courts. God, what are the amazing things. So there you have kind of almost that combining almost, dare we say, of archivocards. archaeology and mythology. I mean, it's very tantalizing. What a discovery. It was a great discovery.

And hats off to Rob to knowing I was wrong about the trash pit thing. So in certain circumstances, we can believe that, you know, potentially theorize that the victims, the losers of a ballgame match would be sacrificed if that team are meant to be, are meant to not survive in the first place. They're not like a team from the nearby city coming for a. competition kind of thing. Right. The ones that there would be competitions where the losers would be sad, but not dead. And then there were these ritual reenactment moments, which may have happened on, you know, an annual basis. We know that the creation story begins on in our calendar August

13th. So there could have been, you know, an annual event in which the king recreated the key moments of their creation, putting himself in the place of the hero twins, and a proper sacrifice was made. Though the Maya were not so sacrificing, the Aztecs were very sacrifice-oriented and bloody. The Maya get kind of stained with that like everybody in Mesoamerica was. Once they teamed up with Central Mexico, they got a lot more sacrifice-oriented. But the classic period, they weren't killing all that many people. Fair enough, but because we're talking about Mesoamerica and the Bull Game, have to ask the sacrifice question.

We've now addressed it. Ed, we've done a lot about the Maya, and we've also mentioned about the Aztec. But as you've hinted time and time again in this chat, the ball court and the ballgame spreads far and wide across Mesoamerica with these different cultures. Are there any kind of particular versions of the ball game from different cultures that you'd like to focus on that we should highlight? Because there's so many names like the Zapotex, the old mechs, Tejah Tewa Khan, and so on. Are there any that really stick out to you that we should focus on?

Well, you know, let's give the Zapotex moment here. Let's do it. They have a very strong ballgame tradition. Montielbaum has a big court. There's an interesting site called Dyn Zoo, which is early Zapotech, and it has a ball court, but the images around it are unlike the rules that we hear. There are guys who are holding balls in their hand. balls that are like the size of a softball.

And there are other guys that have masks on that look like a catcher's mask for baseball. Those ones are crazy. We see them throwing and holding the balls and there's some with bats. So that one, I mean, what is the version that we're looking at there? Is that Dodgeball? The neat thing is that the ball game still exists there. And there are people in the vats. of Wahaka, who play it as a sporting event,

team versus team, city versus city, and in their version, they have a big stone paddle that's connected to their hand by a leather glove, and they paint their stone all nice colors. And then there's a ball about this big, which is solid, that they bounce. And so they hit it with this paddle back and forth, but there's still the center line in the lane, and it's five versus five.

And to them, I've played this game with them. I've seen it. One of the things that they do is a psychological element that we can't see in the archaeology. They like to do all sorts of jokes back and forth to upset and unnerve the other team. I asked him one time, like, do you ever do any mama jokes? They were like, no, mama jokes are straight out. Nobody gets to do any mama jokes. But they do things to upset each other, a psychological element to the game.

That's going to be there as well. sledging. I mean, the classic, whether it's cricket or football or anything. Even curling in their Inter-Olympics, right? You know, where the voices are raised against each other. You can imagine that happening back, whether in Zappatech or Olmec or classic Maya ball courts all around Mesoamerica, right? Are sports, sports without the smack talk? I don't know. So it's almost kind of like paddle or kind of like, yeah, almost, well, first it's kind of like baseball with a bat, but it's not quite that. Do they bounce at all, the Zappateck balls?

Oh yeah, they bounce super far. They're those super balls. They're solid. So when they hit the ground, even when it's dirt, they bounce way up. And if you hit them with your paddle, right, you can launch them into the sky. And those ball courts do they also, and also, sorry, I completely jumped the gun. When we mentioned the Zapotech, should we be thinking kind of central Mexico area today? Yeah, well, Haca, right?

You know, Mexico's got that skinny part called the Isthmus of Tawantepec. Waxaca is one of the states in that skinny part. So it's like very middle of Mexico, up in the mountains. And their ball courts, they still have the big kind of around goals. Nope, they don't have the rings. In fact, the guys that are playing today and older guys are teaching younger guys, nobody can tell me how long it's been going on in the Northern Valley is where I go. At a site that's actually San Jose Magote is a 600 BCE site in,

Wahaka and from its big mound, you can look down on their dirt field. It's not, it's not formal at all now. It's basically just a big patch of dirt and they paint the lines into it when they want to play. And then they rub them out again. But you can see it from, it's neat. I mean, the place 600 BCE, you can be looking down on a sport that's still being played, thousands of years later.

I love that continuation. And I know Dan Snow played some Maya ball game in Belize not too long ago, which was very interesting to watch. Oh, yeah, the Maya are doing it more and more. It started in tourism with the Maya, honestly, but now they're really into it. There's leagues. Yucatan has leagues, Guatemala has leagues, Belize. And so they're starting to play against each other.

It's kind of beautiful to see this sport revive. Absolutely. And showing how the Maya is still very much alive. and they're very proud of their heritage and elsewhere. This has been fascinating so far, I've got a few more questions. The first is we talked about the Zappadex, Aztecs, Maya, ballgames, and the clear differences must have been between them. With the creation stories as well,

did the kind of creation stories change depending on where the ball game was being played, which culture? Because we've talked about the Maya one, but were they different ones for different cultures? There were. I'm not very acquainted with, the one in Zapatak area, but the central Mexican one, which is shown in murals and art going back thousands of years, or at least a thousand years before the Aztecs, talks about a different

version where the ballgame has a totally different but important element in it. There's a part of that creation story from central Mexico in which a big mountain called Sustinance Mountain is the place where humanity is going to be. get corn from and the water comes down out of the mountain and it goes down in an underground like an aquifer and then springs up in a ball court and then the water comes out of the ball court and waters the first fields and they get corn but the the ball game in that scenario is basically the the vehicle through which they get their life-giving staple crop right at Tehr Tahuakan, amazing place.

But why is this almost kind of the anomaly when it comes to the ballgame and ball courts? Because they have done. And it is a crazy anomaly that, frankly, upsets me. I mean, it's impossible. They are surrounded in people who are obsessed with the ballgame. Teotihuacan is a huge city of Fayoad, probably 100,000 people at its height. It's just north of modern-day Mexico City. Yeah, massive, amazing.

And it's a huge city. But it's out in kind of a highlands desert environment. So the surveys are easy. It's not in the middle of the jungle. The buildings have not been that torn up. And great surveys have gone on multiple times. There's no way we're missing the ball court. It's just not there.

It should be everywhere. But it's not. And more frustratingly, there are murals that we found at Teotihuacan, and one of them shows people bouncing a ball back and forth with each other. So they had it, but there's no ball court. Do you think a ball court could be found in the future nearby Teotihuacan? It's almost like the anomaly that is kind of outside the main area, not near the pyramids and so on. Oh, further frustrations.

Yes, there are. There are places that I would say are less than 50 kilometers away from, Teotihuacan living contemporaneously with Teotihuacan with ball courts. And so they on purpose don't have a ball court. You know, there's a lot of explanations. Perhaps there's was, you know, a temporary court that they set up and then took down. Perhaps they played it a different way. Perhaps they bounced it off the sides of pyramids like we see in certain Maya images.

So, I mean, I would say that it's not that they didn't have the ball game. It's that we archaeologists haven't seen it for what it is yet. That's also a great point there, Ed, the fact that you have thousands of these stoneball course. Am I right? More than a thousand stone ball courts discovered so far? Oh, yeah, over 2000. And that's just what we've discovered. There are thousands more sitting out in the jungle.

And to think, like, maybe how many of them were actually made of, you know, you say were temporary or made of turf and timber, which haven't survived or cannot be as visibly seen. You know, where the archaeologists, have they actually just scratched the surface with the multitude of bullcorts there have been over the thousands of years in Mesoamerica? That's exactly what I think, that we're just not seeing the fullness in Teotihuacan and that there are still a ton of things that we need to learn about the ballgame and its evolution over 3,000 years, 4,000 years almost. So, Ed, how does the ball game, how does it? it go out of fashion? Why does it go out of fashion? It goes out of fashion because the Spanish stomp it out. The Spanish priests quickly realize how absolutely integral the religions of the region were to the ballgame. And so they ripped up

the ball courts and they outlawed the ball game because it was so connected to the religion they were trying to stomp out and replace with Christianity. And so for several centuries it's written about but not played and only more recently it's come back into life again. It's been revived. That's right. Even after they destroyed the ball courts in the contact period, people would still play in the dirt and on the run. They were kind of renegades, but people were obsessed with it in the same way that we are obsessed with our sports. They did not let it go very easily. Even though they couldn't play on their courts anymore, they continued to play on the sly, and the evidence is still in places like Sinaloa, which didn't have anything the

Spanish wanted, so they left them alone more. The game just perpetually survived there. Well, to finish off, let's kind of go back to the beginnings, which you mentioned in passing earlier on, and I feel we need to go back to it, with the Olmec, perhaps best known for the Olmec heads, Leventa, and places like that. But you did mention earlier, Ed, how although there any ball courts from that time, you have got the earliest rubber balls. So what do we know about this? This is amazing. That was, you know, a beautiful find. Archaeologists look for states of preservation and certain environments give them and certain don't. Over in Europe, you guys have those wonderful macabre bog bodies that are fall into swamps that are anaerobic environments. And so just the

oxygen gets sucked out and you still have the guy with what he ate for lunch in his gut. This was what El Manatee was. It was a swampy little area that's near a little hill called El Manatee, but as so often happens in Mexico, the story begins with some guys just trying to dig a pond for their cattle to get water in. And they realize they're in this swampy, anaerobic environment. and Olmec wooden statues start coming up and skeletons. And so archaeology gets into it,

but at the very lowest level of this thing that they dug out and prepared with whatever anaerobic muck this was, at the very bottom levels, at about 1,700,700 BCE were a dozen balls, and they were preserved. So we know that this ball, at least, if not the incomplete game was there by 1600 BC.

And the bull has come before the earliest known bull courts from Enumaz America? Well, no, very close. Frustratingly, not the Olmec, but the oldest one is at a place called Paseo de la Amada in Chiapas. Like close, it's an area we call a Socanusco. It's near the Pacific coast. but that one is 1650. Okay, my apologies.

It's kind of like one culture has a ball court. The other one has a ball. We didn't find any balls at Paseo de la Amata, just the court. And then we know that the Maya, that's so old, we don't even call those guys the Maya. We call them the Mochaya. But the Mochaia were trading with the Olmex. So we know these two were associated.

Again, it's got to be a. case of just archaeology. The Olmec built their buildings out of earth, not stone. So probably their ball courts have melted away, or we just haven't seen them yet. So not a case of the old mechs brought the bulls and the predecessor of the Maya, they had the bull courts. And then Eureka, it all comes together. Oh, we've got chocolate. We've got peanut butter. Let's put them together. It's that sort of thing. Now, it might have been. Who knows? I mean, that's the fun and job security of archaeology, isn't it? This has been really fun.

I know we've covered a lot of grounds and, you know, it's gone from culture to culture, but it's still been wonderful to give us an introduction of the ball game and the archaeology behind it. Because you've been involved in so many digs around the ball court, and we've mentioned a few like that skeleton from Belize, but are there any other finds very close to your heart, discoveries very close to your heart,

linked to the ball game that we haven't mentioned yet, that you'd like to reveal before we completely wrap up this chat? there's a site that's becoming big news these days again, Tony Nah, and there's a panel on the top of their, or midway up their pyramid, with two kings diving for the same ball. It's big. It's an exaggerated ball. But I love that one so much. Just it's such a sport image. And it looks down on their actual ball court. I love that one. But you know what? This week, I love seeing. a globally recognized sport being played in a place called Aztec Stadium. I like to think that the Aztecs would be like, yeah, we made that rubber ball. Enjoy that world. Do you think kind of all that today, the fascination of football sports, but at the same time, the fact that archaeology in ancient history is reaching a much wider audience now,

thanks to podcasts, thanks to YouTube and so on, that the interest in kind of these early ancient to ball sports like the ball game. Interest in it, the fascination in it will only grow from now on. Well, I sure hope so. That's my whole business. Let's get people excited about the ancient past, right? That's something both of us are trying to do. The world, I would love to see outside of the Maya world the first Maya ball game being played. But those guys don't care what we think of them. There's that Sinaloa has a big group of ballplayers. Wahaka does, Yucatan does, Guatemala does. I dream of a day where these are actual televised sporting events.

Imagine. And I think it could happen. And it may be one day in the Olympics as well, potentially. Wouldn't that be great? Ed, this has been such a wonderful chat. It's been brilliant to get you on the show. Last but certainly, not least, you have got a podcast and a YouTube channel promoting all things Mesoamerica? All things Americas. I've got a podcast called Archaeo-Ed, and that one I just kind of

tell stories off the cuff. And then I have a YouTube that's just archaeologist Ed Barnhard. Both of those I talk about things across the Americas. I consider myself an Americanist, so I try to talk about South America, North America, and Mesoamerica and those. But I have fun doing it. It's a nice outlet. Well, thanks for bringing it up. I hope some of your folks will give me a look. Brilliant, Ed, just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come and join us on the ancients today. It was my pleasure.

Anytime. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Ed Barnhart coming on the show to talk all about the baller game in Mesoamerica, both in the Maya world and beyond. I hope you enjoy the episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you want more from the Maya world,

well, I've got good news for you. We do have a selection of episode we recorded over the years, all about the classic Maya. We'll put a link in the description to two particular episodes, one on Chichenitsa, what we know about this famous site, and another on the Maya collapse. What caused this so-called collapse of classic Maya cities like Tikal just over a thousand years ago? We'll put links to both those episodes in the show notes. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough

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