What Game Did Mesoamerican Natives Play that Ended in Decapitation?

Marion Lloyd, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscribers only) (12-10-04):

In a remote corner of northwestern Mexico, six men in leather loincloths volley a heavy rubber ball across a dirt court, using only their hips. They dive and leap like overly muscled ballerinas, struggling to keep the eight-pound projectile from flying out of bounds -- or rupturing their spleens.

This is how extreme sport probably looked in 1500 BC.

With each bone-numbing thwack, the players are reviving the ancient game of ulama de cadera, or hip ulama. The sport was once as popular throughout Mesoamerica as soccer is today, only with higher stakes. The members of one team were typically decapitated after the game in a ritual blood bath intended to appease the gods. (Whether it was the winners or losers who were sacrificed is the subject of continuing scholarly debate.)

Fortunately for the men of Los Llanitos, a hamlet of tough-talking cattle ranchers in northern Sinaloa state, ulama (pronounced ooh-LAH-ma) has undergone a few changes in the millennia since it emerged around the time of the Olmecs. The game later became central to the cultures of Maya and Aztecs, for whom it was both a religious rite and a means of settling conflicts between warring tribes.

"Today, instead of cutting off your head, the loser buys the beers," says Manuel Aguilar, a Mexican assistant professor of art history at California State University at Los Angeles, who is studying the modern vestiges of the game. Starting last year, he and an archaeologist colleague, James E. Brady, began leading graduate students to Sinaloa to do research on previously unexplored aspects of ulama, such as the role of female players and the religious significance of the game's rules.

The project is motivated by both scholarly interest and a sense of urgency. The sport, which is played like volleyball but without a net and using the hips instead of the hands, has been in decline since the 16th century. Spanish missionaries, who disapproved of ulama's pagan roots and ritual sacrifice, outlawed it in most parts of Mesoamerica. But Indians in northwestern Mexico, an area that was largely outside the colonizers' control, continued to play the sport in secret.

Mr. Aguilar estimates that the game was still being played by hundreds of people in Sinaloa and in neighboring Nayarit state as recently as the 1940s. But by the 1970s the number of players had dwindled to a few dozen, in part because of the growing popularity of imported American games like baseball and basketball. Now ulama survives in only a handful of rural villages near the west-coast city of Mazatlán, with an estimated 50 active players.

"In Mexico, people don't know what ulama is," says Mr. Aguilar, 43."You say the word ulama and people ask, 'What do you eat that with?'" He can barely contain his excitement as one of the players executes a perfect hip volley while pirouetting through the air. The professor keeps a wary eye on the ball as he scribbles a running report on the action.