Episode 33

The Big Game!

Every year, the American football season ends with the Big Game, but this week, Anna and Amber are superfans of a much bigger game: the 3500-year-old Mesoamerican ballgame. From its Olmec origins to the athletes keeping it alive today, learn all about how to play, why you might not want to (ouch), and what makes it so significant to past and present communities.

To learn more about this week’s topic, check out:

Scarborough, V. L., & Wilcox, D. R. (1991). The Mesoamerican ballgame. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Whittington, E. M., & Mint Museum of Art. (2001). The sport of life and death: The Mesoamerican ballgame. New York: Thames & Hudson.

Ballgame (NEH Summer Teachers Institute)

The Mesoamerican Ballgame (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

The Brutal and Bloody History of the Mesoamerican Ball Game, Where Sometimes Loss Was Death (Atlas Obscura)

Early evidence of the ballgame in Oaxaca, Mexico (PNAS)

Maya Ritual and Myth: Human Sacrifice in the Context of the Ballgame and the Relationship to

the Popol Vuh (OpenSIUC)

Popol Vuh (Mesoweb)

Glyphs for “Handspan” and “Strike” in Classic Maya Ballgame Texts (The PARI Journal)

Death Ball (National Geographic)

Tlachtli (Polymer Science Learning Center)

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.