PLEASURE GARDENS, ALCOHOL ENEMAS AND CHOCOLATE-COVERED TAMALES

Pleasure Gardens, Alcohol Enemas, and ChocolateCovered Tamales

Whether it was boxing, gambling, or foot-long cigars, ancient Americans knew how to have a good time. by Rob Crisell

Last September, the Pre-Columbian Society of Washington, D.C., invited six scholars from across the United States to speak on the much-neglected subject of pleasurable activities in ancient America. Few if any such discussions had ever been held on this subject, which made the symposium almost revolutionary. During the day-long event, the scholars addressed a number of enjoyable distractions that Aztec, Maya, Inca, and North American natives enjoyed, including boxing, ballgames, gardening, enemas, tobacco, cuisine,gambling, and music. We interviewed the participants as well as other scholars to try to reach a better understanding of how people in ancient America enjoyed themselves.

Whether it is a prehistoric Passamaquoddy village in eastern Maine or a Maya temple in Quintana Roo, archaeological sites often present a paradox for modern-day visitors. In one sense, the dramatic architecture and romantic landscape of a site may overwhelm us with its power. However, even well-informed, reasonably imaginative visitors often have difficulty shaking off the lonely, silent weight of such places. Everyday activities that must have occupied the past inhabitants— dancing, playing, eating, singing, laughing—seem altogether incongruous at these solemn ruins. It is no wonder that visitors and archaeologists alike often hypothesize solemn people to populate them. As archaeologist Dorie Reents-Budet quipped, referring to the ancient Maya: “For years we had a picture of priests hanging out in the jungle, worshiping time.”

As a result, the anthropological view of recreation was ritualized and sacramentalized to such an extent that it seemed some researchers begrudged the right of any ancient people to so much as play a game unless it could be linked to a shamanistic rite of passage.

The picture has changed dramatically over the past 20 years as archaeologists, especially those studying the seminal Mesoamerican cultures such as the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec, have achieved incredible breakthroughs in the interpretation of hieroglyphics and art while simultaneously rediscovering the ethnohistoric records. Researchers began to question the rigid scientism of the New Archaeology, attempting once again to approach these cultures on more humanistic terms.

As Jeffrey Quilter of Dumbarton Oaks explains, our efforts to compartmentalize human activity in our own

In this George Caitlin painting from the mid-1800s, Ball Play of the Choctaw—Ball Up, Choctaw men in what is now Oklahoma play a rough-and-tumble, intertribal game of stickball. Numerous kinds of ballgames were popular with American Indians.

society are difficult enough. Why would it be any easier for us to do so for a past culture?

“It’s indisputable that in some of these ancient societies, there are things that they did that were fun,” says Quilter. “Whether or not those activities were wrapped in a mantle of religiosity is important to consider, but fun activities ran the same kind of normal distribution that they do today. Consider the way people look at the Super Bowl today. For some it’s entertainment, for others it’s a life and death matter because they’ve got $10,000 riding on a point spread somewhere.”

Justin Kerr, of Kerr Associates, echoes this idea with an example of his own. “On the Day of the Dead in Mexico, when the family goes out to the graveyard and breaks out the tortillas and so forth, it’s a ritual activity,” he says. “But it also becomes a family picnic. These things go hand in hand.”

The hope of the conference’s participants is that this symposium will jumpstart further discussions regarding the significance of recreation in ancient America. The following is a sampling of ways in which Native Americans passed the time in the era before television, Nintendo, and the Internet.

Gardening

The Aztecs were passionate gardeners. The earliest written accounts mention the attempts of nobles to outdo one another in their pleasure parks, where they hybridized dahlias and marigolds, and created sophisticated botanical gardens. The parks were the setting of other delights such as waterfalls, bird sanctuaries, hunting preserves, and hot tubs. The Aztec ruler Montezuma’s favorite royal retreat is today Chapultepec Park, in Mexico City.

“Aztec garden displays were subject to all sorts of sumptuary laws,” explains Pennsylvania State University’s Susan Toby Evans. “Rulers could not only confer gardens upon

A late 19th-century engraving depicts Sioux men and women gambling using plum stones as dice (right).

you if you were a good scout, they could also take them away if you had been disloyal. The Aztec king Nezahualcoyotl and his friends used to visit one another’s palaces and gardens as they were under construction. If someone admired someone else’s palace, they would actually re-create it.”

Gambling

Gambling may be the most important and least analyzed pastime of ancient peoples. Gambling on dice games and athletic events was practiced throughout ancient America for thousands of years. Gambling appears as a common motif in the creation myths of numerous tribes.

“Evidence suggests that gambling is important to the economy—the wealth and status of a particular group may depend on their gambling fortunes,” says Queens College’s Warren DeBoer, who studied archaeological and ethnographical reports during his recent examination of the dice game in prehistoric North America. “The Mesoamericans have the ballgame, but the literature is rather silent on gaming. It apparently was important to Native Americans, and it should be important to us and how we interpret them.”

There are strong indications that furious betting took place during ballgames and dicing. Patolli game boards can be found scratched on the floors of Maya and Aztec structures; versions of this game are found in the American Southwest. A few researchers think that gambling was a vital means of exchanging goods between separate but related groups of people. In DeBoer’s words, there seems to have been a “recondite economy” that existed alongside the more visible system of exchange. Some scholars still argue that the sacred aspects of gambling for Native Americans frustrate any efforts to see it as recreation. In DeBoer’s opinion, though, recreation and religion were no more mutually exclusive for the ancients than they are for us today.

“Like so many things in native America, when it comes to gambling there are religious versions of the games and secular versions,” explains DeBoer.

Cuisine

European explorers described at length the feasts thrown by the various chiefs and rulers of the Aztecs, Incas, and tribes of present-day North America. Meals often would include corn tortillas, chocolate-covered tamales (which were sometimes filled with dog meat), guacamole, breads, bison steaks, and oyster stew.

“There’s a lot of evidence that the Maya enjoyed feasting and putting on theatrics and comedies, which Bishop Landa, an early Spanish chronicler, describes as ‘humorous and obscene,’” explains Michael Coe of Yale.

And, of course, there was chocolate.

“There is pretty good circumstantial evidence that it was the Olmec who first learned how to produce chocolate,” continues Coe. “For the Maya, it was certainly pleasurable for them to drink, and they doctored it up in various ways.”

Like many pastimes in ancient society, drinking chocolate may have been limited to Mesoamerican aristocracy due to to the high cost of cacao beans. A painting from one Classic Maya vase shows a ruler supervising the pouring of chocolate from one vase to another to raise the foam. It’s also likely that ancient Americans imbued chocolate with sacred and medicinal qualities.

Boxing

While evidence for the Mesoamerican ballgame is abundant and well studied, Karl Taube of the University of California, Riverside, and a handful of other researchers believe that many so-called ballplaying images actually depict something else entirely—boxing. Taube believes that both sports are related to ancient water rituals for the Maya, Aztec, and Olmec and that boxing might have taken place at the same time as the ballgame.

“There are many scenes showing that boxing overlapped the ballgame,” says Taube. “People in ballgame costume will be holding these small stone or wooden balls wrapped in a cloth. We usually call these people ballplayers, but they’re not—they’re boxers. The real balls are much larger, about the size of a human skull. Very often the boxers are shown wearing severed heads, bones hanging off of them. They were pretty creepy guys.”

So did the Mesoamericans ever box for the fun of it? It’s hard to say for sure. The materials that provide researchers with most of their information (pictorial ceramic vessels, wall paintings, friezes) depict the activities of the elite class, whereas the lower classes were more likely to have engaged in the activity. However, the current popularity of boxing, professional wrestling, and other violent sports leads us to imagine that those ancient boxing matches were enjoyable, festive occasions for the royals and hoi poloi alike.

This Maya vase shows a ruler accepting a tribute of chocolate-covered tamales (in foreground) and a frothy pot of hot chocolate (to his left).

Maya boxers, wearing elaborate masks and conch shell weapons on their hands, exchange punches. One boxer is already down for the count, his mask on the ground beside him.

In one of a handful of such images from Maya art, a ruler addresses one of his lords while a man behind him smokes a cigar.

“I’m sure people enjoyed the blood sport,” says Taube. “At the same time, the boxing match was a fertility ritual. We think of all this blood as really gory and ugly, but to them it’s really a representation of life. In fact, today there are modern ceremonies in the state of Guerrero where guys wearing helmets and jaguar pelts beat the hell out of each other as part of rain rituals.”

Tobacco

Chocolate lovers may disagree, but the tobacco leaf is probably the most popular export from the Old World. For years archaeologists have known that the ancient Maya, for example, were ardent tobacco smokers, smoking obscenely long cigars and more modestly-sized cigarettes made of aromatic tobacco leaves. Other Mesoamericans apparently smoked, too. According to an early Jesuit historian, after meals, the Aztec lords “composed themselves to sleep with the smoke of tobacco,” breathing in the smoke through thin tubes of cane. Although native tobacco was known to have been much stronger than today’s version, it probably wasn’t hallucinogenic.

Spanish chronicler Father Bartólome de las Casas related the bemused observations of two of Columbus’s crew during their first trip ashore in Mexico: “The two Christians met many men and women who were carrying glowing coals in their hands, as well as good smelling herbs. They were dried plants, rolled in a large dry leaf. They looked like small muskets made of paper that children play with during Easter festivities. They set one end on fire and inhaled and drank in the smoke on the other.”

Justin Kerr has identified several drawings of men smoking on Maya vases. Maya expert David Stuart has even read the Maya word for “snuff” on a small flask from a Maya tomb.

Unlike their southern relatives, tribes in what is today North America were almost exclusively pipe smokers. Clay, stone, and bone pipes are ubiquitous in excavations throughout the United States.

Alcohol

Native Americans had never tasted distilled alcohol before the arrival of Columbus. However, ancient Mesoamericans imbibed fermented drinks, the best known of which is pulque, which was made from the sap of maguey, a plant used to make tequila. Several pre-Columbian cultures used pulque in religious ceremonies, but the stern admonitions against its abuse by Aztec rulers (duly recorded by the abstemious Spanish priests) indicate that recreational drinking did take place. According to Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, one of the first clergymen in Mexico, drinking pulque

An engraved Maya vase reveals a supine man receiving an enema, possibly in connection with a vision quest. The person administering the enema carries large jars, possibly containing pulque, on his or her back.

A drunken party among Maya nobles causes one participant to stagger (far left).

outside of ritual contexts was punishable by death until one had reached the age of 52. During ceremonies, though, everyone from children to slaves was likely to drink to excess.

Kerr has identified many Maya vases that illustrate drinking. One vase shows a man who is so inebriated that he is reeling. Above him is the Maya word glyph “Ah Kih,” meaning drunkard. Kerr believes that the use of enemas by the Maya (and perhaps by the Olmec) has been largely overlooked. Another Classic Maya vessel shows assistants administering an enema to a supine royal, possibly a shaman. While pulque or some other fermented drink is the most likely candidate for the contents of the enema bags, Kerr speculates that it might have been fortified with any number of hallucinogens. It’s thought that enemas were also used in vision-quest rites.

“The reason for imbibing in that manner seems to be due to the fact that ancient American people couldn’t produce anything stronger than 12 percent alcohol,” explains Kerr. “Using an enema bypasses the liver so that the body gets the full blast of that 12 percent.”

Music

For many visitors, archaeological sites such as Hovenweep, Tikal, and Teotihuacan possess an ethereal silence. But images of musicians and dancers on Maya vases “completely changed the auditory landscape” for Dorie Reents-Budet, who has studied the phenomenon of music in ancient Mesoamerica.

“What the ceramics show us are moments in the lives of particular groups of people as well as palace rituals and other events that took place in the royal Maya court,” she says. “One of the things we see are the representations of performances, which run the gamut from highly ritual re-creations of religious ideology to epic tales of heroes and ancient history, farces, and other humorous entertainment.”

Reents-Budet and others have identified several kinds of percussion and wind instruments, and at least one stringed instrument played by the ancient Maya. Since such instruments tended to be made of gourds and other perishable materials, the archaeological record is silent except for their appearance in Maya art.

Reents-Budet feels strongly that some of the images that researchers once interpreted as religious are actually depictions of elaborate dramas that would have been enacted for the rulers and their guests.

“What we are in fact looking at is entertainment with social and political overtones,” she says. “What we see on these pots are elite-sponsored feasts and huge pageants which also were part of the elite economy of the classic Maya. I’m convinced that a lot of these pots were produced to be circulated as gifts during these feasting events. They’re souvenirs.”

ROB CRISELL is the senior editor of American Archaeology and the Eastern regional director of The Archaeological Conservancy.

KERR JUSTIN Maya musicians play wind instruments for a ruler in a palace scene.