BALLCOURT PETROGLYPHS IN MEXICO MARK SACRIFICE SITES:

On 28 August 2021, I posted a column titled “T-Shaped Doorways, Ballcourts, Pipettes, and the Wind” (Faris 2021) which postulated a relationship between the rock art symbols known as pipettes, Ancestral Pueblo T-shaped doorways, the Mayan character for wind, and Mesoamerican ballcourts.

Ballcourt petroglyph from El Gentil site. Photograph Alex Badillo, Figure 6A. page 12.

Now, a concentration of thirty petroglyphs representing the ballcourts themselves has been recorded in Mexico on the north slope of the Sierra Sur. Representations of ballcourts carved in stone have been found throughout a large area of Mesoamerica but this column will visit the thirty newly discovered ones near Quiechapa.

Contour diagram of a cluster of Ballcourt petroglyphs. Diagram by Alex Badillo, from Figure 8. page 15.

“During an archaeological survey in the municipality of San Pedro Martir Quiechapa, Oaxaca, Mexico, archaeologists from the Proyecto Arqueologico de Quiechapa (PAQuie) encountered and documented a number of carved stone elements. Of particular interest are the 30 representations of ballcourts carved into natural rock outcrops at two sites in the region. This is the highest density in which this type of ballcourt representation occurs throughout Mesoamerica.” (Badillo 2022)

Contour diagram of Ballcourt petroglyph from El Gentil site. Diagram by Alex Badillo, from Figure 10. page 18.

These carved ballcourts were found in two groupings. At a location named El Gentil, twenty-two carved ballcourts measured from 8.0 cm to 34.1 cm in length. (p. 13) Eight more carved ballcourts were identified at a location named El Derrumbadero, with more considered possible ballcourts but too eroded for positive identification.

“It’s not clear what the carvings were used for, but the researchers suggested that ancient Mesoamericans may have used them for rituals. The Spanish priest Juan Ruiz de Alarcon (lived 1581 to 1639), who lived in what is now Mexico following Spain’s conquest of the area in the 16^th century, ‘describes certain rituals during which a [Mesoamerican] priest would have people spill blood into small cavities that they had made in stone,’ Badillo wrote in the study, noting that those cavities could include the ballcourt carvings.” (Jarus 2022) This is not the fallback designation of “ritual or ceremonial” for any feature not immediately understood so often indulged in by archaeologists. This is, in fact, a very reasonable proposition given the ritual and ceremonial nature of the hipball game played in the large architectural ballcourts. This could, of course, be tested with blood protein residue testing.

"The Classic Maya ballgame was far more than a frivolous sport: it was, rather, a ritual correlation of war and human sacrifice. - the Classic Maya confirm the nature of the ballgame by the emphasis chosen in their ballgame art and inscriptions: in that art, they saw the ballgame as part of a larger ritual cycle, with a focus on huan sacrifice." (Miller and Houston 1987:63)

Mayan Ballcourt from Monte Alban, view from above. From Badillo, Figure 6B, page 12.

"The association between human sacrifice and the ballgame appears rather late in the archaeological record, no earlier than the Classic era. The association was perticularly strong within the Classic Veracruz and the Maya cultures, where the most explicit of human sacrifice can be seen in the ballcourt panels - for example at El Tajin (850-1100 CE) and at Chichen Itza (900-1200 CE) - as well as on the decapitated ballplayer stelae from the Classic Veracruz site of Aparicio (700-900 CE). The Postclassic Maya religious and quasi-historical narrative, the Popol Vuh, also links human sacrifice with the ballgame. Captives were often shown in Maya art, and it is assumed that these captives were sacrificed after losing a rigged ritual ballgame." (Wikipedia)

So the range of these sacrifices ranged from auto-da-fe in which a participant let some of his own blood as a sacrifice to the gods, to the death by execution of a prisoner. We are told that the gods needed regular infustions of blood to keep the world operating in order.

"These seemingly inert stone carvings in Quiechapa's landscape may have been part of deeply meaningful and active social performances that included ritual bloodletting for many possible purposes, including mainting balance and agricultural fertility, marking important moments in time, or fomenting intra- and inter-community bonds. However, further studies that attempt to understand the details of these fitual performances are required to go beyond the hypothetical understanding of these features. In the end, many more questions are left unanswered about the meaning of these carvings and how they were understood and used in the pre-Hispanic past by the prople who lived in rural Quiechapa on the northern slope of the Sierra Sur region." (Badillo 2022:27-8)

As I stated above, whether or not sacrificial blood was ever deposited in these ballcourt-shaped carvings could be relatively easily determined with blood protein residue testing of the kind that is performed on stone tools. It would be really interesting to find out on way or another.

Ballcourt at Toninas, Chiapas, Mexico. Illustration from latinamericanstudies.org.

Another aspect of the ritual significance of the Maya ballgame has recently presented itself in excavations at Tonina. "Tonina, meaning 'house of stone' in the Tzeltal language was originally called Po'p, Po or Popo in Classic Maya texts. The city is located in the Chiapas highlands of southern Mexico, east of the town of Ocosingo. The site contains two groups of temple-pyramids set on terraces rising some 71 metres above a central plaza, two ballcourts, and over 100 carved monuments that mainly date from the 6th century through to the 9th centuries AD during the classic period." (HeritageDaily 2022)

In one of the larger temple pyramids researchers discovered a crypt in 2020. A labrynth containing a series of small vaults and rooms connected by stairways led to an antechamber and the crypt at a depth of 8 meters inside the pyramid and dating from the 7th and 8th centuries AD. "The antechamber and crypt have small niches where the researchers found more than 400 vessels filled with organic material such as human ashes, charcoal, rubber and roots. A miicroscopic analysis of the organic material revealed that the human ashes (likely the remains of high-ranking people or Maya rulers) was used in the vulcanization process for hardening rubber, used for making balled used in Maya ritual ball games played in the ballcourts at Tonina." (HeritageDaily 2022)

The discovery that the ball itself used in the sacred Maya ballgame is created with the ashes of sacred ancestors gives a whole new level of meaning to the ritual importance of the game and the rites associated with it.

NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.

REFERENCES:

Badillo, Alex Elvis, 2022, Ballcourt Representations in Quiechapa, Oaxaca, Mexico: Ritual Offerings, Fertility, and Life, 11 January 2022, Cambridge University Press (online), https://www.cambridge.org

Faris, Peter, 2021, T-Shaped Doorways, Ballcourts, Pipettes, and the Wind, RockArtBlog, https://rockartblog.blogspot.com/search/label/pipettes

HeritageDaily, 2022, Maya crypt contains cremation burials used for making rubber balls in ritual ball games, 2 August 2022, accessed 2 August 2022.

Jarus, Owen, 2022, Ancient ritual bloodletting may have been performed at carvings found in Mexico, 3 May 2022, https://www.livescience.com, accessioned 4 May 2022.

Miller, Mary Ellen, and Stephen D. Houston, 1987, The Classic Maya Ballgame and its Architectural Setting, Academia.edu

Wikipedia, Mesoamerican Ballgame, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame. Accessed on 18 June 2022.

 

T-SHAPED DOORWAYS, BALLCOURTS, PIPETTES, AND THE WIND:

T-shaped doorway, Porcupine House, Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, Colorado. Photograph Peter Faris, June 1981.

What do the T-shaped doorways of the 4-Corners area and the I-shaped ballcourts of Mesoamerica have in common. Just possibly the Hohokam pipette symbol is what they have in common, or more precisely, perhaps both of those shapes influenced the development of the pipette symbol.

T-shaped petroglyph, Square Tower Canyon, Hovenweep National Monument, San Juan county, Utah. Photograph Peter Faris, 28 May 1988.

Ruin of T-shaped door in foreground. Aztec Ruin, Aztec, San Juan County, New Mexico. Internet photograph, public domain.

T-SHAPES: Lekson states quite unequivocably that the T-shaped doorway originated in the 4-corners region in the areas influenced by Chaco Canyon and spread from there. “And we can say with some confidence that T-shaped doors began at Chaco, proliferated across the Four Corners during Aztec’s era, and all but disappeared from the northern Southwest at the same time they reappeared far to the south, at Paquime and the Casas Grandes region. T-doors are, indeed, all over the map, but in sequence: T-doors followed the Chaco-Aztec-Paquima meridian. If some enterprising graduate student crossed their eyes and dotted the Ts into a GIS with time periods, they would pop up first around Chaco and at a few of its outliers, then show strongly at Aztec and throughout its region, and finally all but vanish in the north and explode at Paquime and all over northern Chihuahua.” (Lekson 2015:85) The T-shape is not only seen in doorways in the American southwest. There are also examples found in rock art in various locations.

T-shaped petroglyph embellished at top. Northwest New Mexico. Photograph Wendell Wilmoth.

T-shaped doorway, Casa Rinconada, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. Photograph Peter Faris, August 1984.

Mayan T-shaped wind symbol, 'Ik'. Internet illustration, public domain.

Callis (2021) sees the influence as having gone the other way. “It is proposed here that the T- or Tau-shaped doors so emblematic of Southwestern architecture after AD 1000 are the result of that contact. T-shapes similar to those in the North American Southwest are found as wall perforations at the late Classic – and highly unique – site of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico. Furthermore, although not readily evident, the doorways of many Terminal Classic Maya structures also incorporate the T-shape. T-shapes are also found as architectural elements in other features, such as friezes, throughout Mesoamerica. That the T-shape is a representation of the Mayan glyph Ik’ – that signifies both wind and breath and, by extension, life or spirit – is widely accepted within the Mesoamerican context. This paper demonstrates through comparison with Maya and other Mesoamerican architecture, as well as analysis of known Southwest-Mesoamerican contacts and known instances of cultural diffusion, that these Mayan T-shapes, the most basic form of the Mayan glyph Ik’, also inspired the T-shaped doors of the Southwest.” (Callis 2021:1)

What we do know is that whichever way the influence of the T-shaped door went it can be found both to the north and the south of the Hohokam region so it is certain that they were exposed to it and knew of it.

Pipette, Cochise County, Arizona. Photograph from Arizona Memory Project.

PIPETTES: The pipette symbol is centered on the Hohokam region (although examples have been found farther away). Pipettes are basically a series of squares connected by a central passage. Wright and Russell (2011)  illustrate approximately 60 pipettes from rock art sites in their paper (incidentally they also include five T-shapes, supposedly as half pipettes, and a few images that I did not include in this count because I just cannot agree with their identification of the symbol as a pipette). In their paper Wright and Russell mostly picture pipettes with two (28) or three (24) lobes, although they also have a single square they so identify as well as some with four (5) and five (3) lobes.

Hohokam Pipette symbol, Pima Canyon, Arizona. Photograph Debbie L. Wise.

Hohokam Pipette symbol, Hieroglyphic Canyon, Arizona. Photograph Dale O'Dell.

“We submit that the compartmentalization of the cosmos into containers was  a conceptual metaphor of the tiered cosmos. This metaphor was embedded in the Uto-Aztecan language shared across Mesoamerica and the Greater Southwest and materialized in pipette symbolism. The distribution of the pipette compares favorably with the spatial extent of Wilcox’s (1987) ‘Mesoamerican cosmological metastructure’, supporting our assertion that the pipette was a key symbol of this religious structure with roots in Mesoamerica. While there is no evidence for pipette imagery in Southwestern material culture prior to AD 600, scenes of transcendence are known from Archaic Chihuahuan contexts.” (Wright and Russell 2011:377-8) In other words Wright and Russell are suggesting that the pipette symbol represents tiers of the cosmos with a passage up through them (for the entry of humans). This does not, however, account for the facts that the pipette symbol is so similar to the I-shaped ballcourt of Mesoamerica, and the fact that Mesoamerican culture had a large influence on Hohokam culture, including ball courts.

I-shaped ballcourt, Zapotec, Monte Alban, Mexico, ca. 500 - 100 BCE. Internet photograph, public domain.

Mayan I-shaped ballcourt, Cihuatan site, El Salvador. Photograph Wikipedia.

BALLCOURTS: One of the iconic features of Mesoamerican urban sites is the ballcourt. Many of these were formed in the shape of the capital letter “I”.

Ballcourt of Gravel, Mixtec, Codex Yuta Tnoho, Online illustration, public domain.

I-shaped ballcourt, Paquime, Chihuahua, Mexico. Online photograph, public domain.

“In contrast to the lowlands, the first highland ballcourts date to over a millennium after the Paso de la Amada court. The first securely dated full-sized ballcourts, from the end of the Middle Formative (600 to 500 BCE, occur at the central Mexican highland sites of Capulac Concepcion and La Laguna. While exhibiting different orientations, both courts have similar sizes and shapes: lateral mounds terminate in closed ‘end zones,’ giving the court, in plan view, the I shape so typical of later ballcourts throughout Mesoamerica. In Oaxaca, I-shaped ballcourts, interpreted as boundary and defensive mechanisms associated with a state game centered at the Zapotec urban center of Monte Alban, first appeared in the final portion of the Late Formative.” (Blomster and Chavez 2020) While these are named Ballcourts, and we certainly believe that the Mesoamerican ball games were conducted in them, they are also believed to have served a number of other functions, ritual and otherwise.

So, with the main sequence of construction (with T-shaped doors) at Chaco occurring between 850 and 1125 CE, and with the peak of Hohokam culture dating from between 850 and 1400 CE, and with Mesoamerican ballcourts recorded from 1400 BCE to the 1500s CE we have sufficient time overlap for the influences from the north and the south to come together with the Hohokam, resulting in the pipette symbol.

So is the T-shape half of an I-shaped ballcourt? Is a two-lobed pipette a I-shaped ballcourt, or two T-shapes together end to end? Is a three-lobed pipette a ballcourt and a T-shaped doorway connected? I really cannot say, although I do believe that those more conversant with Hohokam than I should take a detailed look at it. What I can say is that with the influences from both the north and the south converging on Hohokam that amalgam is certainly a possibility.

NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.

REFERENCES:

Blomster, Jeffrey P. and Victor E. Salazar Chavez, 2020, Origins of the Mesoamerican ballgame: Earliest ballcourt from the highlands found at Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico, 13 March 202o, Science Advances, Vol. 6, No. 11, KOI”10.1126/sciadv.aay6964

Callis, Marc, 2021, Ik’ Way: The Mayan Origin of T-Shaped Doors in the North American Southwest, Southwestern Lore, Summer 2021, Colorado Archaeological Society

Lekson, Stephen H., 2015, The Chaco Meridian: One Thousand Years of Political and Religious Power in the Ancient Southwest, Rowman and Littlefield, Boulder, Colo.

Wright, Aaron M. and Will G. Russell, 2011, The Pipette, the Tiered Cosmos, and the Materialization of Transcendence in the Rock Art of the North American Southwest, Journal of Social Archaeology, 11(3), pages 361-386