Discoveries

April 26, 2023

Keeping Score

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Archeologists in Mexico discovered an intricate stone marker in the country’s southeast that was used by the ancient Mayan in a ballgame that resembles modern-day soccer, the Washington Post reported.

The marker was unearthed at the Chichén Itzá archaeological site in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, one of the main archeological centers of the Mayan civilization and a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Believed to date to the 11th century, the elaborately-carved circular piece measures 12 inches in diameter and weighs nearly 90 pounds. The archeological team said the marker also displayed unusual hieroglyphic writings around two players at its center standing next to a ball.

The find is particularly significant because it marks the first discovery in more than a decade of an object with hieroglyphic writing at Chichén Itzá, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

The stone’s depiction of the Mayan ballgame adds more insight into the mysterious sport, which dates back more than 3,000 years and is considered one of the first organized sporting events.

Still, there are lingering questions about the marker: Researchers aren’t clear if it was a scoreboard because the hieroglyphs are not easy to decipher.

“There’s some kind of debate amongst (researchers) as to whether they’re just very crude … or whether they’re actually what we call pseudo-glyphs, a point that is past literacy when people imitate text or they can’t actually write them anymore,” Simon Martin, a curator at the Penn Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, told the Post.

This story originally appeared in the April 26, 2023 newsletter, Shiny, Happy People.