A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [98]
A leading expert on these games, Michael Whittington, thinks these stone belts were primarily for ceremonial use:
Wearing an object that’s 75–100 lbs around your waist during an athletic competition will slow you down considerably, so they were probably worn as part of the ritual ceremonies at the beginning of the game. They do represent the real yokes that were worn during the ball game, but those real yokes were of perishable materials and they in almost all circumstances have not survived.
We know a little about this Central American ball game because it was quite frequently represented by local artists, who over hundreds of years made sculptures of players and models of pitches with the public sitting on the walls of the court watching the players. Later European visitors wrote accounts the game, and several stadia built specially for it still survive today. When the Spaniards arrived they were amazed by the ball that the game was played with, because it was made of a substance entirely new to Europeans – rubber. The very first view of a bouncing ball, a round object seemingly defying gravity and shooting around in random directions, must have been extremely disconcerting. The Spanish Dominican friar Diego Durán reported a sighting:
They call the material of this ball hule [rubber] … jumping and bouncing are its qualities, upward and downward, to and fro. It can exhaust the pursuer running after it before he can catch up with it.
This was not an easy game. The rubber ball was heavy – it could weigh anywhere from 3 or 4 kilos (8 lbs) to almost 15 kilos (30 lbs) – and the aim was to keep it in the air and eventually to land it in the opponents’ end of the court. Players were not allowed to use their hands, head or feet, but had to use their buttocks, forearms and above all their hips – which is where a padded belt would have been most useful. The belts actually used in the game, probably made of leather, wood and woven plants, had to be strong in order to protect the wearer from the heavy ball but light enough to allow him to move about the court. In 1528 the Spanish brought two Aztec players to Europe, and a German artist painted them in mid game, back to back, virtually naked, wearing what look like specially reinforced briefs with the ball in flight between them. The exact rules of the game are unclear and may have changed over the centuries, as well as varying throughout Central America’s different communities. What we do know is that it was played in teams of between two and seven players, and scoring was based on the result of faults, as in tennis today. These faults included touching the ball with a prohibited part of the body such as the head or the hand, failing to return it and sending it out of the court.
The eyes and mouth of the toad on the belt
The balls also became a kind of currency. Spaniards recorded the Aztecs’ exacting tribute payments of 16,000 rubber balls. Not many balls have survived, but excavations and finds made by farmers across Mexico and Central America have turned up a few, as well as hundreds of stone belts like ours and stone reliefs and sculptures showing players with belts around their waists.
By the time our belt was made, around 2,000 years ago, elaborate stone courts built specially for the game were being used. Many were rectangular and several had long sloping walls off which the ball could be bounced. Spectators could also sit along the top of these great stone structures and watch the matches unfold. Clay models show supporters cheering on the players and enjoying the game, just as football fans do today.
But these games were far more than just competitive sports: they held a special place in the belief system of the ancient Central Americans, and our stone belt is a clue to these hidden beliefs. Along