Please join us next Friday, April 12th, for our final spring talk in the Ancient Latin America Lectures. Next week’s lecture is by Dr. Jeffrey Blomster, Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. His lecture is entitled: “The Emergence of the Mesoamerican Ballgame: A Highland Perspective”.
The ballgame has been celebrated as an essential feature of Mesoamerica civilizations; its origins, however, remain obscure. Due to a mixture of one early ballcourt and scattered imagery, the ballgame has generally thought to have first emerged in the lowlands of the Gulf Coast and southern Pacific coast; no compelling contemporaneous evidence of the ballgame has been documented in the Mesoamerican highlands. The recent discovery of the earliest highland Mesoamerican ballcourt in the Mixteca Alta region of Oaxaca, Mexico, challenges this narrative. This paper details the architecture and dating of two early ballcourts at Etlatongo, as well as associated imagery, providing interpretations on the nature of the game and its social context.
12 pm, 51 Hillhouse Avenue Rm 101 and on Zoom. Lunch will be provided.
Zoom link: https://yale.zoom.us/j/98856670429