The Seriousness of Play: What Ballcourts Tell Us about Sociopolitical Negotiation in Nejapa and the Eastern Sierra Sur, Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

The Prehispanic ballgame was an important ritualized sport and shared cultural tradition throughout much of Mesoamerica, and has long been linked to local and regional sociopolitical relationships between different communities and social groups. The widespread popularity of ballgames prior to the Conquest can be noted in many different ways, and the persistence of games through the centuries to the modern day demonstrates their continuing importance for indigenous and mestizo communities. However, the role of the ballgame in local and regional politics would have varied over time as different places and people innovated and reacted changing social and political circumstances. The Nejapa subregion of the eastern Sierra Madre del Sur, where multiple ballcourts of various types where recently documented, was a multicultural and multilingual boundary zone. The presence of several ethnolinguistic groups with possibly distinct social identities, who were alternately hostile and cooperative towards each other, would have greatly impacted local and regional political machinations and how people made sense of their changing world. Because of its very nature as a competitive sport requiring at least two teams to play, the ballgame would have been one way to negotiate movement across different social and cultural boundaries. How ballgames would have been used as a social or political strategy, would have changed over time through the decisions and actions of the people who hosted, played, and watched these games. In the present dissertation, I examine the spatial attributes of the ballcourts in Nejapa, and the distribution of both the structures and their attributes on the physical and social landscape from the Late Formative through the Postclassic (300 BCE – CE 1521) in order to assess the degree to which the ballgame was interwoven, or not, with local and regional community politics. While traditional methods such as excavation can be time intensive and cost-prohibitive, collecting mapping data and analyzing it using Geographic Information System (GIS) is a non-invasive method that can be used to explore ballcourts and the ballgame at the regional scale. In this dissertation, I explore the ballcourts using a synthesis of in-depth geospatial analyses, archaeological survey and excavation data, and ethnographic information gathered from local communities to understand what distribution patterns of ballcourts and their attributes reveal about the ballgame, social relationships and political organization in the Nejapa region and the southeastern Sierra Madre del Sur. Analysis of the data shows that there is both a remarkable degree of similarity but also some marked differences in the Nejapa ballcourts from the Late Formative through the Postclassic, suggesting that were shared ways of playing and perhaps even similar rule systems but that communities still constructed their courts according to their specific needs and preferences. In other words, I argue, there were local traditions of shared practices or traditions such that communities could negotiate rules and play techniques between then. Based on both the material and linguistic evidence as well as the different ballcourt types present here, I conclude that people in Nejapa were potentially making connections to various ethnolinguistic groups and regions farther off, resulting if not in mixed, heterogeneous communities, then in relationships that frequently crossed ethnolinguistic boundaries that many have previously treated as being more static or impermeable. Nejapa’s strategic position along critical trade corridors and its rich alluvial land made it an attractive location for many people, who through their shared experiences of living in this frontier region forged new identities that at times were communal or contrasting while at the same time exposing them to novel ideas and practices that were differentially adapted and innovated. Over the course of history we have periods in Nejapa where multiple courts were in use, and control of the game may have been decentralized, and other periods in which there was only one court and access would have been controlled by the leaders of the communities that built them, signaling different strategies for employing ballgames and their associated ceremonies depending on the particular social and historical circumstances in which they were played. Despite these changes, the game still had a critical role to play in the local and regional politics of the various heterogeneous communities of Nejapa. Overall, the dissertation demonstrates how GIS technology can be used to investigate ballgames and ballcourts as social fields and spaces at different spatial and temporal scales.