We’re hanging here at the La Ceiba RV park in Catemaco (Caw-tea-maw-ko) another day or so, it’s Sunday, Nov. 19, 2006 and I’m trying to catch the NFL games today. I have ordered streaming audio of all the games over the internet and then I’ve got the TV tuned to an early game, Oakland vs. Kansas City, shown on a local station (with audio in Spanish). The sources are out of sync by about a minute so I watch the play on TV, and a minute later, listen to the play by play from the computer. Strange, but no stranger then the stuff you do. Yes, I can see you through your computer screen.
Anyway, here are some more pictures of the ancient city of El Tejin.
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They tell me that there are 17 ballcourts here but I only found two so I am no longer sure what I’m looking for when it comes to ballcourts. Most of the hoops that are traditional on either side of a ballcourt have been stolen and the rest removed to be placed in museums. But still, I would expect to see a wide narrow area with viewing stands on either side of any ballcourt. I suppose you folks should come here and see for yourselves. Why is the hoop stolen so often? It’s because of the macabre history of the hoops, and their artistry. During ritural games, sometimes lasting for days, the teams would use the head of someone bested in battle or the head of a sacrificial victim. The human head pushed or tossed through the hoop would count as a score, sometimes ending the game. Much like todays basketball. Every member of the loosing team could be killed. Kind of an inducement to play really, really hard. Many players died during games. Other games appeared to be just for practice where the teams tossed handmade balls of flora through the hoops to score. Thanks to the Spanish, we can only guess at most of the daily history since they destroyed all the written codicies and we only have bare sketches and their biased opinions of some of the daily life here.
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Thought that I would take my own picture with the neat structure in the background but I miss timed, that’s why I have a stunned look, it’s called the Pyramid of the Niches and is said to have 365 niches (it’s crumbled some). The pyramid was painted red and the niches black. It would have been impressive when built for sure:
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The pathways and plazas shown here are original. Very comfortable to walk on, not the bumpy plazas of old Europe or the ancient roads of the Romans (I’m told), though this place has some roads like those too, the main road into this complex is rough cobblestone:
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Well, that’s all the pictures I have of El Tajin. Tomorrow we are getting back on the road so I’ll not be on the web for a few days. After that, I’ll put up pictures of this place, Catemaco, quite the lake they have here. It’s been raining heavily for the last couple days so we’ve kind of stayed indoors mostly. But the first whole day we were here, I got some good shots.
If you can’t get enough of the ruins, here’s a link to another site that has more pictures:
to think, the spanish thought of the mayans, incans and other societies they encountered as primitive and barbaric. those are amazing ruins.
Very cool spot and I do hope to vist it someday. Did anyone tell you what the purpose of the niches was? BTW, take the stories about the ball games w/a grain of salt. I have read on several occasions that they really aren’t sure how the games were played.
Offerings were placed into the niches. Dead relatives, that sort of thing. Kidding. Effigies of relatives.
As far as the ball courts go…if you’ll spend some time investigating, I think you’ll find that I’m mostly right. They have been able to decipher many glyphs and the best-educated, historically supported guess is what I mentioned. There are also the diaries and letters home of many ordinary Spanish soldiers that were there that support my contentions. Not to mention the chronicles of the Spanish priests relaying local histories and myths.
“As might be expected with a game played over so long a timespan in several different nations, details of the games varied over time and place, so the Mesoamerican ballgame might be more accurately seen as a family of related games. Some versions were played between two individuals, others between 2 teams of players. For the Aztecs, it was a nobles’ game and was often associated with heavy betting. According to Fray Diego Duran, gambling was often a problem. People evidently bet everything they owned and even staked themselves, ending up as slaves.
The games shared the characteristics of being played with a hard rubber ball in a sunken or walled linear court, sometimes with perpendiculars at the ends, so that the field is shaped like a capital I with serifs. The goal was to knock the ball into the opponent’s end of the court; in post-Classical times, the object was to make the ball pass through one of two vertical stone rings that were placed on each side of the court; in the surviving version of ulama, the goal has evolved to resemble volleyball.
The ball game was extremely violent. Players wore heavy padding. Even so, there were often serious injuries, and occasionally death. Some bruises were so bad that they would have to be cut open, and the blood squeezed out. This would have certainly been significant in the rituals of sacrifice and bloodletting that accompanied the Aztec ballgame. On some occasions post-game ceremonies featured the sacrifice of the captain and other players on the losing (some references say “winning”) side. The association of the game with sacrifice and death was particularly marked on the Gulf coast. A loser’s skull might be used as the core around which a new rubber ball would be made. (Conversely, guides at Chichen Itza assert that the prize for the winning team was to be deified by losing their heads, supposedly at the hands of the losing team.)”
This article seems to support my off-the-cuff suppositions. Therefore, I chose to believe it. I did, somehow, forget the rubber ball part. It was used for a proven 2600 years in the game. Sorry. I’ll remember details better the next time I talk about an ancient civilization that’s been gone for thousand’s of years. I hope.