The Origins of the Mesoamerican Ballgame: A New Perspective from the Northern Maya Lowlands

The Mesoamerican ballgame is a subject that has received a great deal of attention from scholars. This attention has largely focused on the political and societal implications of the game for Classic and Postclassic period Mesoamerican cultures. Discussions of the antiquity of the ballgame often focus simply on the oldest known Preclassic examples of ballcourt architecture, and assume that these earliest courts played a similar role to their later counterparts. Recent discoveries of more than 20 examples of Middle Preclassic ballcourts at Maya sites in northwest Yucatan provide a new source of data on the early Mesoamerican ballgame and a new perspective on its societal role.