The Mesoamerican Ballgame

The Mesoamerican Ballgame PDF Author: Vernon L. Scarborough
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816513604
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: Vernon L. Scarborough
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 9780816513604
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Ritual, Play, and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies

Ritual, Play, and Belief in Evolution and Early Human Societies PDF Author: Colin Renfrew
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110714356X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
This book presents unique new insights into the development of human ritual and society through our heritage of play and performance.

The Sport of Life and Death

The Sport of Life and Death PDF Author: E. Michael Whittington
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500051085
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: Rex Koontz
Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
ISBN: 1938770439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
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.

Pre-Columbian Ballgame

Pre-Columbian Ballgame PDF Author: Nicholas M. Hellmuth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ball games
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description


Middleworld

Middleworld PDF Author: Jon Voelkel
Publisher: Darby Creek
ISBN: 1606840711
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
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.

Mexico

Mexico PDF Author: Michael D. Coe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Masterly....The complexities of Mexico's ancient cultures are perceptively presented and interpreted.--Library Journal

Maya Political Science

Maya Political Science PDF Author: Prudence M. Rice
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292757840
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
How did the ancient Maya rule their world? Despite more than a century of archaeological investigation and glyphic decipherment, the nature of Maya political organization and political geography has remained an open question. Many debates have raged over models of centralization versus decentralization, superordinate and subordinate status—with far-flung analogies to emerging states in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But Prudence Rice asserts that neither the model of two giant "superpowers" nor that which postulates scores of small, weakly independent polities fits the accumulating body of material and cultural evidence. In this groundbreaking book, Rice builds a new model of Classic lowland Maya (AD 179-948) political organization and political geography. Using the method of direct historical analogy, she integrates ethnohistoric and ethnographic knowledge of the Colonial-period and modern Maya with archaeological, epigraphic, and iconographic data from the ancient Maya. On this basis of cultural continuity, she constructs a convincing case that the fundamental ordering principles of Classic Maya geopolitical organization were the calendar (specifically a 256-year cycle of time known as the may) and the concept of quadripartition, or the division of the cosmos into four cardinal directions. Rice also examines this new model of geopolitical organization in the Preclassic and Postclassic periods and demonstrates that it offers fresh insights into the nature of rulership, ballgame ritual, and warfare among the Classic lowland Maya.

A Whole New Ball Game

A Whole New Ball Game PDF Author: Allen Guttmann
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 9780807842201
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Traces the development of modern collegiate and professional sports, explains how they reflect American culture, and looks at the role sports have played in Americanizing immigrants

The Popol Vuh

The Popol Vuh PDF Author: Lewis Spence
Publisher: New York : AMS Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description