The Ball Game

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I n many pre-Columbian cultures, teams of men and women participated in a competitive ball game similar to soccer. The ball was hit with the head, arms, hips, and legs, but could not be touched with the hands except to put it into play. In the ancient Americas, there were different types of courts, and variations in rules and the sizes of teams, but the game was important to many cultures; it can be dated back to at least 3000 B.C. in Mexico. Among the Taíno, the ball game was played in the batey, a paved court often lined with carved stones. Taíno ball games were typically held during areytos, in which communities from several chiefdoms came together to recount their joint histories and legends, and to cement their social and political relationships with singing, dancing, and feasting. The bateys found by archaeologists tend to be located on the borders of cacicazgos, which indicates that areytos focused on diplomacy as much as on ceremony.

The pre-Columbian ball game was potentially lethal because the solid balls - made from rubber, fiber, and cotton - were heavy and extremely fast. Players wore protective belts and padded accessories on their arms and legs. Most depictions of ball players in pre-Columbian art suggest that belts were made from a combination of wood, fiber, and cloth. But the Taíno in Puerto Rico also created belts of stone, known as "collars," in two forms: heavy and thick or slender and attenuated. Some scholars believe that these stone collars were actually worn during games; others interpret them as memorials that accompanied the dead to the otherworld. The corpus of Taíno art also includes stone objects known as codos, or "elbows," which may be belt fragments to which wooden pieces were once attached.

The stone collars were carved with motifs that had religious significance, such as owls and bats associated with the spirits of the dead, circles symbolic of the fifth direction, and a fish that refers to a myth concerning the creation of the sea. Such designs suggest that, in addition to their possible function as belts, the Taíno used collars to help them remember myths and creation stories. The carved petroglyphs that enclosed bateys also seem to depict Taíno myths.

A number of collars recovered by archaeologists represent unfinished belts, which were carved from the center outward, and would have been finished with the final modeling of the exterior. Artists made collars using bone and flint chisels, and a fine, taut cord that enabled them to saw through stones with the aid of water and fine sand. String-sawing was also used on the mainland, primarily in Costa Rica and Panama. Although laborious, it is a credit to the Taíno that they were able to carve large works of art in stone, including duhos, statues of zemies, and ball game paraphernalia. The advanced state of Taíno lithic carving is particularly apparent in the stone belts associated with the ball game.

The ball game had both secular and sacred levels of meaning among pre-Columbian societies and the Taíno appear to have been no exception. To the Aztec and other Mesoamerican societies the ball symbolized the cyclic journey of the sun under the earth and up into the heavens. Among the ancient Maya, the ball game had religious meaning, but also served as a public reenactment of warfare, in which tortured captives were forced to play games that they invariably lost, for which they were sacrificed. Since Taíno bateys were located on the geographic borders of cacicazgos, ball games probably served to deflect hostilities over territorial disputes. It is also known that mock battles were staged during areytos, perhaps with the same purpose in mind.