Description

Ball courts are often located in or adjacent to important ceremonial and monumental areas, and were used for playing a ritualized ballgame that involved heavy natural rubber balls, solid wood bumpers around the waist, and, it is thought, possible sacrifice of its losers. Human sacrifice in the Maya lowlands, however, never reached the mass scale later practiced at locales such as Aztec Tenochitlan. The ball courts in the southern lowlands were smaller than the more famous, later examples from the Northern Yucatan, such as the Great Ballcourt at Chichen Itza. This particular court is very small, and may have served a symbolic purpose, or perhaps it was used for an unknown one-on-one ballgame.

Keywords: Image copyright CyArk,licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

Media Id: media_TIK_20071002_203630 Date Uploaded: 2007-10-02 20:36:30 Points: 314364