[Aztlan] Aztlan Digest, Vol 42, Issue 22: ballgame question

[Craig]

This is an interesting idea.  The difficulty is that contemporaneous portrayals of players, such as those on Maya vases, show that both teams or players wear the yokes.  Most researchers suggest that the stone yokes were ritual devices, perhaps stone recreations of long-since-decayed wicker or wood yokes.   A few researchers however do believe that the stone yokes could be worn in play and were effective in propelling the ball.
 
Craig Fisher


--- On Thu, 5/28/09, aztlan-request at lists.famsi.org <aztlan-request at lists.famsi.org> wrote ("Daniel Parker" dan.parker at urgrad.rochester.edu wrote:):

I've been thinking about the ball game, those heavy yokes, and the prisoners who were forced to play. Could it  be that the home team got their winning advantage by forcing the visiting squad to wear the yokes? Kind of like in baseball, where the home team has white uniforms, and the visiting team has a darker uniform (at least it used to be that way when I was a kid).