Ball Courts In America Analysis

Carrasco, David and Scot Sessions. Daily Life of the Aztecs: People of the Sun and Earth. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Throughout the humanities course, I have been intrigued by a vast amount of information on different cultures. However, there was a particular section that truly caught my attention, and has piqued an interest in me that has caused me to do my own research aside from this paper. The culture of the Mayas, and the Aztecs has been extremely fundamental in understanding my ancestry, being that I am Mexican American. I took an interest in their beautiful architecture, their ritualistic and sacrificial religious practices, as well as their history and how they began. Throughout this paper I will outline the similarities and differences of these two cultures, as well as articulate an understanding of the humanity disciplines outlined above.

Misra (2017) suggests that the Olmec culture of Mesoamerica heavily practiced yoga from Hindu-Buddhist culture, and were originally migrants from China - specifically, from the Shang and Xia dynasties. Evidence is drawn from Misra’s interpretations of various Olmec artwork (including statues and figurines) as depictions of yogic asanas, and as influenced by Hindu-Buddhist religion as well as Chinese-style sculptures. These theories are based on the sudden appearance of the Olmec culture in Mesoamerica, therefore the Olmecs were migrants from China who were influenced by Hindu practices.

Mesoamerica have been connected the North and South America culturally and geographically throughout the history. Mesoamerican culture and aspects heavily influenced southwestern United States, being the frontier borderline between North America and Mesoamerica. It is very important to study the relationship between the Mesoamerica and American Southwest because American Southwest contains various elements of Mesoamerican culture and this provides fundamental information about human behaviors, history, interactions, and tradition in America. Our group has selected Agriculture, Architecture, Religion, and Trade as our categories to analyze the relationship between American southwest and Mesoamerica. Fair trade, we will focus on scarlet macaws and how it got traded from Mesoamerica in the American southwest and its significance. For architecture, we will compare the ball courts of Hohokam and that of Mesoamerica. Significance of ball courts and how it got introduced into the American southwest from Mesoamerica will be discussed as well. Religion will be analyzed by focusing on the cosmological beliefs of both groups and the similarities and differences between Mesoamerican cosmology and American southwest cosmology.

American archaeologist and anthropologist, Stephen Plog, wrote an account of the pre-Columbian natives of the Americans titled Ancient Peoples of the American Southwest. Plog’s purpose is to communicate the cultural and ritualistic lifestyles of the prehistoric natives of the southwest, which spans across the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada with some mention of trade with Mexico. The author has demonstrated an effective approach of an objective viewpoint on the lives of the prehistoric south westerners using sources from excursions from previous archaeologists such as, Paul S Martin and David R Wilcox among many others who excavated the vacant villages of the southwest.

Sports, especially ones that involve a ball, are modern America’s favorite pastimes. Well, this was also true for the Mesoamerican people of the ninth century. While the event does not have a specific name, it is referred to as the Mesoamerican ballgame. Like basketball, this game was played on a long, rectangular court (Stokstad 405). The ball itself is said to be pretty heavy and rubber. Unlike basketball, the players wore protective gear because the actual sport of the game was to use everything but your hands to hit the ball. The object was to make it into the protruding stone goal, in which the ball would enter horizontally and not longitudinally. Some scholars suggest that perhaps the Mesoamerican ballgame was used in times of warfare,

In the book Daily Life of The Aztecs On the Eve of the Spanish Conquest by Jacques Soustelle you are walked through what life was like for the Aztecs. You are in 16th Century Mexico, or to them Mexico-Tenochtilan. Soustelle does an excellent job immediately putting you in character with the introduction of the book. The book is broken down into seven different main chapters detailing major aspects of the Aztecs lives in the late 1500’s. You learn about where they lived, to the wars they fought, and what life was like for them from birth to death. In this paper I will further discuss four topics that were very crucial in the daily lives of the Aztecs. I will help you find a better understanding in their daily life as well as the many changes they migrated through over time. The four topics I will be discussing are: 1. Culture and Customs of the Aztecs 2. Civilization vs Barbarism 3. Art and Architecture 4. Education and Home Life.

When you hear of an Advanced Ancient civilization in North America, you usually think of either Mayans, Aztecs, or sometimes the Olmec. But in this paper I won’t be talking about any of those civilizations, we’ll be talking about the Native Americans that lived in the Mississippi Valley, by the Mississippi River. That have their capital not 6 miles outside of St.Louis.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles offers a surface level depiction of Mesoamerican civilization and culture. It excludes essential information and instead gives a shallow representation that offers implications of a barbaric civilization.

The Mesoamerican ball game was said to be invented around the Pre-classical Period by the Olmecs and was a well adopted sport by many different civilizations by the time of the Classical Period. In Mesoamerican mythology the ball game is a significant factor in the story of the Mayan gods Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu. Both of these gods had annoyed the gods of the underworld with their noisy playing and the two brothers were tricked into going into the underworld where they were challenged to a ball game (Cartwright). The two brothers eventually lost the game and Hun Hunahpu had his head cut off. This would be a common practice in the

In the second article, “Sports, Gambling, and Government: America’s First Social Compact?” Hill and Clark’s subject is the Mesoamerican ballgame as it relates to the development of government. Although, Hill and Clark do provide some primary images and sources, it is not strictly a biographical article. Because the text mainly focuses on the collection of data an evidence of the first forms of Maya government as well as the first ballcourt, the authors are interpreting and characterizing the subject of the text from an archeological standpoint. Archeology, the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture, is used quite often throughout the article to prove the authors thesis. One example of an

While certain symbols and figures maintained the significance and meanings despite the passage of time, art styles utilized by the different Mesoamerican civilizations evolved with the passage of time. Having a unified system in which each of the figures possessed the same meanings and importance for each civilization, allowed for the emergence of an art style that could be easily understood and utilized by most. Before the Postclassical International system, there was not a unified art style used through Mesoamerica; this system was an expression of the unification among the dominant religious and political views at the time after the fall of Teotihuacan and before the rise of Tula (Kubler “Ecleticism” 172). Developing a unique, yet universal style was enabled by the similarities in the ideologies of the different Mesoamerican civilizations. Through repeated interaction, the symbols and styles merged. In order to create a system different cultures could understand and identify, the meaning attributed to each of the symbols had to be somewhat similar throughout the different regions. The merger could not have occurred if the symbolized used by the different population did not resemble each other. Due to their similarity, with repeated interaction the

The ancient world of Mesoamerica entered a long period of change that soon led to the development a mammoth city that would serve as a regional center for more than 600 years. Beginning in about 1000 B.C. the majority of the people in the Valley of Mexico relocated to one of two primary sites, that of Cuicuilco in the southwest corner and Teotihuacan in the northeast. By about 300 B.C., Cuicuilco dominated the region, but its heyday would soon diminish. (Sabloff 2000, p 60)

Massive temples hidden in the jungles of the Yucatan, mysterious stone stelas, and cryptic calendars eluding to advanced knowledge of the stars and mathematics are just some of the artifacts originating from the “Classic Maya” period (200 CE-900 CE). However, these popular items should not be the only defining characteristics of a society that dominated the Mesoamerican region for nearly a millennia. Dynastic lines, similar to those found in European houses, were important elements during this period in places like Palenque, Tikal, and Calakmul. Additionally, the Maya experienced violent and consistent warfare between localized powers and the backbone of their society, agriculture, suffered through several multi-year droughts. These factors

Basketball relates to geography in many different ways. I reshearched and found a way that will help NBA Coaches draft the best possible team. This methid is called heat maping. Heat mapping is a geographical representaion of data where the individual values contained in a matrix are represented as colors. The hottest color is red which stands for where the most points per shot are taken from, and the coldest color is blue which stands for where the least points per shot are taken from. This relates to geography in different ways, but here is one example. When you watch the weather on TV and there is a heat map of our contry it could be showing many different things. Tempatures are one of the things that can be recorded on a heat map. If Colorado