Howcome everything old we dig up get this "probably ritual use" stamp?
Humans do a lot of stuff for ritual purposes
Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
11–20 of 63 posts
Re: Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
#12I really wish ancient sports would make a comeback. I would give an arm and leg to spectate at an ancient sports demo event. Sort of Renaissance fair meets Olympics vibe.
The incessant commercialization is a limiting factor as well. Getting rid of uniform logos and going back to the days where all the competitors were naked and covered in oil would certainly boost interest.
It sounds like they had uniforms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Ballgame
> The usual dress for players is known from iconographic and figural findings. These show leather protection mainly at the hips and the chest, but sometimes also at the knees and the arms, though very seldom at the feet. The clothing was used to protect against the impact of the ball. The protected parts of the body were used to strike the ball. Some players would wear head dresses (like deer heads) for ritual reasons.
Re: Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
#13I really wish ancient sports would make a comeback. I would give an arm and leg to spectate at an ancient sports demo event. Sort of Renaissance fair meets Olympics vibe.
The incessant commercialization is a limiting factor as well. Getting rid of uniform logos and going back to the days where all the competitors were naked and covered in oil would certainly boost interest.
I have been thinking that having the competitors being naked would solve lot of issues related to equipment and equality. Specially in sports like field, swimming and why not in football either.
Re: Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
#14I really wish ancient sports would make a comeback. I would give an arm and leg to spectate at an ancient sports demo event. Sort of Renaissance fair meets Olympics vibe.
Agreed, and more generally, I would love to know what life was like for these people. We have an advanced civilization that was almost totally wiped out. Millions of people living their lives independently of western civilization.
I’ve toyed with the idea of plotting the era and location of popular TV and movie narratives. I think you’d find that most of them are very narrowly focused on a handful of places and times. This may not be a recipe for successful TV, but I would love to watch a TV show about the Maya or the Olmec or the Inca (or really any of the pre-Colombian indigenous people of the Americas). Like all people, I’m sure that these people had dramatic lives, but it would be all the more interesting because it would be a totally different culture. When you think about what modern civilization has inherited from these people—-agriculture especially—-it’s a shame that we don’t know more about them.
Re: Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
#15Howcome everything old we dig up get this "probably ritual use" stamp?
Humans do a lot of stuff for ritual purposes
Yeah, but humans do lots of stuff just for fun too.
It was a serious question. I see this "probably ritual" a lot when reading about old things. I get the feeling that this comes from some older Hobbsian "brutish and short" view of how people lived. Like "since they where not as advanced and smart as us the must have been half starved all the time and coudn't possibly have a ball game just for the hell of it"
Re: Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
#16I really wish ancient sports would make a comeback. I would give an arm and leg to spectate at an ancient sports demo event. Sort of Renaissance fair meets Olympics vibe.
Saw some little youtube documentary about a group in mexico trying to resurrect the ball game. I have a feeling it would be tough to weigh where to keep things to 100% to what we know vs. filling in the blanks to make it more entertaining. Seems to have been going on during the olmec period too which would indicate at least around 3000 years of play... lots of different variations over that time. Tough to decide whic…
Tough to decide which one to pick.
This is what makes me very sad, for those trying to recover their culture.
For example, there are many Native Canadians trying to recover their culture and language, their history. And I wish them all success!
But at the same time, I often see such discussions talking as if that culture was static. Unchangeable. "This is how we did it", from elders, which barely remember anything other than the fading memories of ther great grandparents.
Instead, I hope that such culture can be brought back, but with an understanding of "what if such culture was not wiped out, but instead, stayed alive and existed through change to modern times".
An example would be food, and dance, and music, and stories. All of these would transition to modern mediums, and tools, and yet, still stem from the past, while simultaneously being influenced by the widening world, and expanded trade, and so on.
I think the greatest loss is not the way things were, past culture, because everyone loses that, humans always change, regardless of technology.
Instead, the greatest loss is what could have been today.
And I would love to see what could have been.
Re: Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans do a lot of stuff for ritual purposes
Yeah, but humans do lots of stuff just for fun too. It was a serious question. I see this "probably ritual" a lot when reading about old things. I get the feeling that this comes from some older Hobbsian "brutish and short" view of how people lived. Like "since they where not as advanced and smart as us the must have been half starved all the time and coudn't possibly have a ball game just for the hell of it"
I believe it's that fact that it has survived for so long that it may have been treated with greater care and build quality than an everyday item. Of course it could have been an everyday object.
Re: Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
#18Howcome everything old we dig up get this "probably ritual use" stamp?
Everything new can get that stamp too: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirem...
Re: Mayan ball game scoreboard thought to be over 1k years old found in Mexico
#19Howcome everything old we dig up get this "probably ritual use" stamp?
I once went to an Ohio State football pre-game show where the band played and they had the players march through into the main stadium. Everyone was wearing the team colors, every song they played had these hand gestures and words you had to do and say along with the music, and there were all sorts of odd seemingly out of nowhere cheers and exclamations by the fans, the players and the various highly dressed up musicians and officials. If an alien species came down and observed it, I would be surprised if they didn't say this kind of thing had "ritual undertones".