My name is Andrew Turner, and I've been working as a postdoctoral associate in the Art of the Ancient Americas through a joint appointment in both the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art History Department. So what we're looking at is a little model that shows the Mesoamerican ballgame being played. There're several really interesting things about the Mesoamerican ballgame.

One, it's probably the oldest continuously played sport in the world, and it is still played today in parts of West Mexico. It's even being revitalized in the Central Valley of California by migrants who've come up from the western states of Jalisco, Zacatecas, Michoacán, and Oaxaca. Usually the game is played in a special stone-lined court that's shaped—at least if you're looking at it from a bird's-eye view—like a capital letter "I," with a central playing alley and two end zones on either end.

Two, the game would be played with rules more or less similar to soccer in that you couldn't touch the ball with your hands. You'd bounce the ball off of your hips or maybe shoulders or knees, and the ball is actually made of rubber. Something that's really important and interesting about the Mesoamerican ballgame is it was the first game in the world to use a rubber ball. So basically two teams of people would line up on either side, bounce the ball back and forth, and the goal is to get the ball past the other team or to make it bounce too many times, to where it's dead and out of play.

It almost appears as if we're watching two different moments of the same game, because if you look, there are way too many balls for the game to be played. From what we understand about the game, it's basically anywhere from one to six players on a side, and they're bouncing one ball back and forth. And there are possibly five things here that you could consider to be balls in this game, although I think three of those are probably court markers. So there's one more or less in the center of the court, and there're two that are kind of lined up with that, at either end. But then there are two that are off-center, and I think those might actually be the balls that these players are using.

And also you can notice that the players seem to be clustered around different areas of activity. So, this raises some interesting questions. Are we looking at a game in which two balls are being played? Or are we looking at something that's not a snapshot moment of one moment in the game but, rather, two different points in the game? Or maybe these two different points suggest a sort of continuous play in the game that we might not otherwise think of, if we only saw, say, one ball being played by two teams of people.

A famous mythical story is the Popol Vuh, which is the Maya creation epic that was written down in the eighteenth century. Basically it involves two hero twins who go down into the underworld, where they play the ballgame against these underworld deities. One of the twins ends up becoming decapitated, and then they finally end up defeating Death. He's resurrected, and he becomes the maize god. So he's actually a symbol of corn and a symbol of regeneration; he actually defeats death.

This leads a lot of modern people to assume that the winner of the ballgame would get decapitated in Mesoamerica. And I just really don't think that's true. I mean, I think, just logically, you'd run out of good players pretty quickly if you were decapitating all the winners. And above and beyond that, what would be the incentive to win? I think the honor of symbolically being the maize god, when push comes to shove, probably wouldn't do it for you. But there were high-stakes games in which losers would probably be decapitated.

For the Maya, we know that rulers would play ball against each other sometimes. Usually this would follow a warfare event between two cities. So one ruler would capture another in warfare, and rather than executing them on the field, they would play ball against each other, one on one. Almost invariably the victorious city's king would beat the other player, and that player (i.e., the ruler from the other city) would be decapitated. And we do actually have artwork showing decapitated ball players going back to at least A.D. 600 or 700.

The ballgame is a really important part of civic identity. It's really important for mythology. The ballgame, we sometimes think, is symbolically linked to the movement of the sun. The ball might be something like the sun, so a ceremonial game might perpetuate the movement of the sun.

Others link it to making rain. The ball court seems to be a sunken space and sometimes even a symbolic pool of water. The loud thud of that solid rubber ball on the floor might actually mimic thunder, which would invoke rain. But it's an absolutely important part of Mesoamerican culture and elite identity, civic identity, mythology, et cetera, et cetera.