Dedicated masonry ballcourts, long rectangular alleys flanked by sloped or vertical walls, appear in the archaeological record across Mesoamerica from at least around 1400 BCE, making the ballgame one of the oldest continuously attested ritual practices of the region, played in some form by nearly every major Mesoamerican culture, Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, and Aztec among them, across a span of roughly three thousand years and considerable regional variation in rules, court design and religious emphasis.
Players struck a solid rubber ball, a Mesoamerican technological innovation of real significance in its own right since natural rubber processing was otherwise unknown outside the Americas at the time, using the hips rather than hands or feet, wearing protective gear including a yoke around the waist, and the game demanded genuine physical skill and stamina that ancient depictions and later colonial accounts both treat as remarkable. The game's cosmological frame is attested across surviving textual and pictorial sources: the ball's movement was read by some traditions as echoing the movement of celestial bodies, particularly the sun and other cosmic cycles, and the game features centrally in Maya mythology, most famously in the Popol Vuh, where the Hero Twins play the underworld lords of Xibalba in a ballgame with the stakes of life and death themselves.