Situating a Cached Ballgame Yoke from Matacanela, Veracruz

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ballgame complex was an important component of the Classic Veracruz style that spanned the Late or Epiclassic period (AD 600–900) and that was concentrated along the Mesoamerican Gulf lowlands and extended into adjacent regions. The ballgame, however, has early roots, both in Mesoamerica in general and in Veracruz in particular. In this paper, we will situate stylistically, spatially, and temporally a broken yet complete stone ballgame yoke recovered from an in situ Late Classic offering context at the Classic period center Matacanela, located in the south-central Tuxtla Mountains. Although the date of discard and interment was during the Late Classic, we examine how this yoke compares with the broader corpus of carved stone yokes and consider processes of curation, authority, place-making, and memory in ancient Mesoamerica.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32248