The Mesoamerican Ballgame

The Mesoamerican Ballgame

Author: Vernon L. Scarborough

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9780816513604

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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 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.


The Mesoamerican Ballgame

The Mesoamerican Ballgame

Author: Vernon L. Scarborough

Publisher:

Published: 1991-09

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13:

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Some 20 scholars have contributed to this engrossing study of a Mesoamerican rubber-ball game played on a masonry court in many different forms and on many different levels--religious, political, recreational--over a period of 2,000 years and a range of a million square miles from Central America up into Arizona (vestiges of ancient courts remain near Flagstaff). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR


The Sport of Life and Death

The Sport of Life and Death

Author: E. Michael Whittington

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780500051085

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The Mesoamerican ballgame was no ordinary sport. Played by the Olmecs, Maya and Aztecs, from at least 1200 BC to the Spanish Conquest in the 16th century AD, it was both a contest of breathtaking athletic skill and a ritual spectacle in which the struggle between the opposing forces of day and night, good and evil, life and death was enacted by the teams on the ballcourt. ''The Sport of Life and Death'', the most comprehensive work ever on the Mesoamerican ballgame, brings together a range of these works of art, of striking beauty, vivacity and power, from tiny jade carvings of the Olmecs depicting their player kings to the ring-shaped stone goals that once stood in Aztec ballcourts. Essays by leading authorities on Mesoamerican art and culture discuss all aspects of the ballgame, such as the natural history of rubber, the magnificent architecture of the ballcourts, the extraordinary equipment worn by the players, the complex religious symbolism and ritual elements of the games and descriptions of versions that are still played today in Mexico.


Blood and Beauty

Blood and Beauty

Author: Rex Koontz

Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press

Published: 2009-12-31

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1938770439

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Warfare, ritual human sacrifice, and the rubber ballgame have been the traditional categories through which scholars have examined organized violence in the artistic and material records of ancient Mesoamerica and Central America. This volume expands those traditional categories to include such concerns as gladiatorial-like boxing combats, investiture rites, trophy-head taking and display, dark shamanism, and the subjective pain inherent in acts of violence. Each author examines organized violence as a set of practices grounded in cultural understandings, even when the violence threatens the limits of those understandings. The authors scrutinize the representation of, and relationships between, different types of organized violence, as well as the implications of those activities, which can include the unexpected, such as violence as a means of determining and curing illness, and the use of violence in negotiation strategies.


Middleworld

Middleworld

Author: Jon Voelkel

Publisher: Darby Creek

Published: 2010-04-27

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 1606840711

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When his archaeologist parents go missing in Central America, fourteen-year-old Max embarks on a wild adventure through the Mayan underworld in search of the legendary Jaguar Stones, which enabled ancient Mayan kings to wield the powers of living gods. Includes cast of characters, glossary, facts about the Maya cosmos and calendar, and a recipe for chicken tamales.


Rain Player

Rain Player

Author:

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1995-09

Total Pages: 36

ISBN-13: 0395720834

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To bring rain to his thirsty village, Pik challenges the rain god to a game of pok-a-tok.


Prehistoric Mesoamerica

Prehistoric Mesoamerica

Author: Richard E. W. Adams

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 548

ISBN-13: 9780806137025

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An up-to-date overview of Mesoamerican cultures from early prehistoric times through the fall of the Aztec Empire, Prehistoric Mesoamerica, Third Edition will be useful and appealing to readers interested in Mesoamerican art, society, politics, and intellectual achievement.