Mayan Ball Courts: Dreaming of More Exotic Archaeology
"A Mayan ball court is a large depressed space with stone walls that archaeologists think—well, we're pretty sure—was used for sporting events. There are several Maya vases that illustrate these games, played with a rubber ball. The first Mayan ball courts were built around 1400 BC; when the Spanish got here, in the 16th century, the games were still being played, by the Aztecs. There's even an example in the American southwest. After the Spanish got here in the 16th century, they did their darnedest to destroy them all, but fortunately, they missed a few."
"An arena, then, basically?" asked Tim the tall.
"Exactly. Most of them were I-shaped, with cut stone steps on both sides of a long narrow alleyway. The alleys ranged in size from about 50 to 115 ft long by 10 to 40 ft wide or so. Copán has one that's pretty cool."
"What was the game like?" asked Lucy.
"Well, they think it was more or less like soccer—you weren't supposed to touch the ball with your hands or feet."
"Boooooring."
The Dangers of Ancient Sports
"Hardly!" said Linda. "The players wore heavy stone horse collar arrangements and, at least in the 16th century, if you lost, you lost your life. On one of the vases, it shows that you actually had to play on the stair arrangements, too. Some of the ball courts have a stone hoop on a side wall.""Wow, that sounds really neat. I want to work there, or somewhere where you actually find big architectural structures," remarked Tim the not tall.
"Well, there is good archaeology in Iowa, it's just a little harder to find," I pontificated, and with that, we reached the top of a steep hill.
"Oh my god," said Linda—and there it was, a large 240 x 400 foot depressed oval cut into the hillside, the young soybeans making a nice concentric pattern on the inside. One side of the oval was steeply banked, and it looked, for all the world, like a Midwestern version of a Maya ball court. There had been nothing in the history, nothing in the plat books, and not one of the landowners had mentioned it to us. What was it?
Utter Befuddlement
I must confess; I had a moment of complete and utter befuddlement in the field. There we were out in the wilds of the prairie peninsula of the American Midwest, surveying ahead of a proposed four-lane bypass of the town of Marshalltown, Iowa, and there it was, an enormous physical anomaly—a 200 x 450 ft (60 x 135 m) diameter oval depression, more than 3 ft (1 m) deep over all, with a large banked wall on the south side.When I first got a look at the enormous depression smack dab in the middle of a soybean field, I was stunned. Two questions were uppermost in my mind: What in the world was it? and Why hadn't the landowner said anything to me about it? There was no way the landowner could be unaware of it; he'd planted those soy beans inside the oval, in concentric rings. Surely he must have had a good idea of what it was—but he hadn't said a word.
So there we were, me and my crew, alone in the field, with a depression to investigate. We left the ridge above the oval, and began to survey its interior. Artifacts were pretty scarce here; in fact, the first artifact we found was a metal automobile hubcap marked "Chevrolet;" other artifacts included an automobile door handle; two unidentified metal strips, probably chrome decorative stripping from an automobile; and two fragments of a 78 rpm record.
