1Introduction

Our contribution to Record, Document, Archive: Constructing the South Out of Region (LSU Press, 2026) constructs its study of the South out of deep time across the Gulf bioregion. While this excerpt examines ballgame culture and cave pilgrimage—from Mesoamerican examples to Cherokee ballplay and dark-zone texts—the full chapter looks to underground archives across the Gulf, linking Mississippian cave glyphs and a reading of Jesmyn Ward’s novel Let Us Descend (2023) with contemporary as well as ancient ts’íib (Maya writing, painting, recording of knowledge) from the Yucatan Peninsula.¹ Here, we find a certain geopiety expressed through what Alejandro Shesheña calls “the language of the underworld.”² And we trace Gulf ballgame cultures’ emergence from maize-cultivating societies along the Gulf basin from Coatzacoalcos to Tuscaloosa and beyond, shaping and rerecording a region.

2The Underworld Ball Courts of Cornbread Nations

To start, let’s imagine, sacrilegiously for a moment, the colossal stone heads emblematic of Olmec glory in Tabasco and southern Veracruz (1,500–400 BC) as ancient precursors to the little busts enshrined in Canton, Ohio’s NFL Hall of Fame (far to the north on the Gulf/Mississippi/Ohio watershed). Commissioned as portraits of a succession of rulers in San Lorenzo, La Venta, and Tres Zapotes, the basalt heads are capped in protective helmets (see fig. 1), perhaps worn by warriors and/or by players of the world’s earliest team sport to use a rubber ball.³ Gulf Coast Olman (land of rubber) is often mentioned as likely source of the Mesoamerican ballgame⁴—a mix of ritual and competition, statecraft and divination—that flourished across the region and found its most intense manifestations in the city-state of El Tajín (northern Veracruz) where as many as twenty-one ballcourts have been identified.⁵

The Mississippian game of chunkey may have reached southward into the Huastecan region of Veracruz, and Mesoamerican ball courts have been identified as far north as southern Arizona.⁶ But the north-shore Gulf ballgame most like Mesoamerican hip-ball is stickball (ancestor of lacrosse). Like hip-ball, stickball (Choctaw toli) has been a ceremonial mode of conflict resolution and divination, often involving high-stakes gambling by players and participant communities. Indigenous ballgame cultures are themselves a kind of Gulf matrix, with the Mesoamerican version described by Schele and Freidal as “the pivot of the cycle of creation,” played on courts that serve as “portal[s] to the Otherworld.”⁷ Imagine the ballcourt complexes of El Tajín or of the Southeast Ceremonial Complex (SECC) sharing something with SEC (Southeastern Conference) stadiums in Tuscaloosa or Baton Rouge where players and communities face off to cheers of “Roll Tide” or “Geaux Tigers.” What if (following LeAnne Howe’s ruminations about Native impact or perhaps the land’s directives—four directional space, counterclockwise base-running, and an unclocked temporality—on the invention of baseball),⁸ a set of underworld-invoking ballgames with mesh goals and rubber ball (certainly lacrosse but also basketball and fútbol), or endzone-oriented pageantries of violence (football) shaped something of our present ballgame cultures? Perhaps, despite every desecration that settler-capitalism could bring to the game, something of a bioregional energy remains present (see fig. 2). Even attentiveness to our mascots may turn us to a mega-conference of birds (Eagles, Owls, Ospreys, and Nighthawks), reptiles (Gators, Rattlers, Horned Frogs), mammals (Wildcats, Panthers, Jaguars, Bears, Lobos), or Yellow Jackets, Sharks, Hurricanes, and the ever-rolling Tide itself. One of the best examples of this animated Gulf energy may be found in the Maya sacred text the Popol Vuh with its mythic actions set in cavernous ballcourts. For originalist readings of Tierra Santa, we begin here.

The Popol Vuh documents how ballplay divined humanity’s creation from corn and traces out pilgrimages to the Gulf lowland source of the game, all put to motion around two sets of hero twins and their descent into Xibalba to defeat the Death Lords on their home courts. With this narrative, ruling lineages of the Quiché Maya highlands trace origins and legitimacy to the Yucatec lowlands, presented as a place of pilgrimage where the Quiché elite receive “tz’ib’al” (ts’íib) of Tulan as “signs and symbols of their lordship” from a Toltec/Maya lord.⁹ As Allen Christenson affirms, “the authors of the Popol Vuh made clear that they based their writings on a text from the Maya lowlands,” describing the glyphic source text as “the means of seeing clearly that had come from across the sea,” specifically “the writings of Tulan”—with Chichén Itzá or Mayapan being likely locations for Tulan (Nahua “city”).¹⁰ In short, as Schele and Freidel present it, “the Popol Vuh is a Highland Quiché Maya document, but it is surely a late version of orthodox Lowland Maya theology of the Classic period and earlier” along the Gulf Coast.¹¹

Most to the point, the Popol Vuh presents the ballcourt as a portal between worlds, an underworld space or dark zone where the creation of humanity was made possible, and where seasonal and social order can be sustained. Two sets of twins are summoned by the Death Lords’ four Owl messengers to play ball in Xibalba and arrive at a crossing of red, black, white, and yellow roads, taking the western black road . . . to where the sun sinks.¹² As Marvin Cohodas summarizes, “the first game results in the defeat and death of the elder hero twins, while the second game leads to the destruction of the death gods and apotheosis of the younger twins.”¹³ The primary challenge in Xibalba is to survive a night enclosed in sets of cave rooms (the House of Darkness, Shivering House, Jaguar House, Bat House), each presenting its tests in an escalating scale of terror. The first ancestor-twins never make it beyond the House of Darkness and are decapitated at “Crushing Ballcourt.” The true hero twins of Maya mythology are their sons: Hunahpu and Xbalanque. These twins defeat a primordial bird-monster with their blowguns and descend to the underworld to avenge their father. Savvy tricksters, they accomplish impossible tasks by collaborating with animal allies. Facing the first challenge, the House of Darkness, the twins accept a torch and cigar from the Death Lords, but they place a red macaw feather on the unlit torch, and for the cigars, “they just put fireflies on their tips.”¹⁴ The twins master a literacy of slippage between representation and referent, surviving their night in the cave, with torch and cigars well-lit at dawn.

“‘Let us play ball, boys,’ they were told,” and the Xibalbans toss a rubber ball that “appears to be a skull, but it is merely drawn on the ball.”¹⁵ They compete each morning after surviving a night in a new locker room’s death-trap, emerging to play ball at dawn. In the House of Bats, however, death bats sever Hunahpu’s head, and the boys appear to have lost the match. Tenaciously, Xbalanque substitutes a squash for Hunahpu’s head, then retrieves and reattaches the head as the Xibalbans mistake a rabbit for the ball and are defeated. The ballcourt is clearly a space of transformation and regeneration, carrying a sacrificial and figurative logic. The twins finally die and transform—after directing Xibalba’s diviners to foresee a way to finish them off by fire and to then state to the Death Lords, “It would be good if their bones were ground upon the face of a stone like finely ground maize flour” and “sprinkled on the river.”¹⁶ Their remains sprinkled on the river like cornmeal, “the two of them appeared like people-fish.”¹⁷ They transform into dancing beggars. They sacrifice others who are made whole again. And when One Death and Seven Death seek to be sacrificed and revived, Death dies and Xibalba is defeated.

Only after the twins’ victory over the Death Lords in Xibalba (and celestial apotheosis) are humans created out of corn—the sacred staple retrieved from a deep cleft, cave, or “Split Place” in a mountain, in an act that launches the Fourth Creation, and the beginnings of this world. Speaking from underworld portals and ballplay that made planting the seed of humanity possible, the text transformed like its twins become fish-boys. Only four known Maya codices survived Bishop Landa’s bonfires in Yucatan. The Popol Vuh’s source texts went underground, shifting shape from painted glyphs to another kind of ts’íib: Maya writing in Latin letters.

3Homecoming Ceremonies and Language of the Underworld

Naj Tunich Cave on the Guatemala side of the border of Belize and Guatemala may be the most spectacular dark-zone archive in the Americas, both for its paintings and for the forty-plus glyphic texts on its walls bearing dates from AD 692 to 771.¹⁸ Used by elites from nearby regional centers as an important cave pilgrimage site, Naj Tunich has been cataloged by Andrea Stone, with its texts most recently translated and analyzed by Alejandro Shesheña, even after much of its expressive brilliance was defaced in 1989. Archaeologists’ “discovery” of Naj Tunich and its Classic-era archive in 1979 was as path-opening a moment as was the rediscovery in the same year of Mississippian-era images painted on the walls of Mud Glyph Cave in Tennessee. We underscore the following key observations from Naj Tunich’s dark-zone archives: 1) depictions of the hero twins in full ball-gear (see fig. 3) on cave walls a millennium before the textualization of the Popol Vuh in Latin script; 2) a rich collection of pilgrims’ hieroglyphic texts; and 3) the cave-mouth’s ongoing ceremonial use by a nearby Maya community. The online Ancient Art Archive (launched by National Geographic photographer Stephen Alvarez out of Sewanee, Tennessee, cave country) presents an introduction to Naj Tunich with stunning photographs of Maya texts painted on calcite walls, followed by another photograph of a painting of the hero twins and an image of the ballplaying twin Hunahpu on cave panels—defaced and almost completely destroyed in 1989 near the end of a long genocidal reign of anti-Maya terror. The Ancient Art Archive’s most compelling contribution from Naj Tunich, however, is its documentation of an all-night Harvest Ceremony in the adjacent town of La Compuerta, with ofrendas brought to the cave entrance at dawn. There, on the cave floor, the ritual leader “laid out a cross in granulated sugar, the lines of the cross corresponding to the cardinal directions,” and “poured a sugar circle around it . . . with offerings of herbs, copal, candles, and tobacco laid on top.” The whole cross-inside-a-circle figure completed (much as the figure was drawn in charcoal on Mississippian-era cave walls in Tennessee), the ceremonial leader offered prayers to the four directions and lit the ofrendas. A final photograph bears the caption, “As the fire spread, men danced around the swirling fire, throwing seeds into the blaze.”¹⁹

The Naj Tunich archive presents a formulaic language of litany and invocation, which Shesheña terms “el lenguaje del inframundo.” One of the most visually stunning texts from Naj Tunich is among the richest in implication for understanding the reach of the cave’s pilgrimages. This text (see fig. 4) narrates the co-participation of pilgrims from various sites, Caracol, Sacul, and beyond—mentioning even Calakmul to the north—leading to consideration of how the cave’s ritual use may have helped build regional alliances.²⁰ As Shesheña translates it: “On the 27th of August, AD 744, Tum Yohl K’inich, Lord of K’an Tu Mak (Caracol) lit a fire in the cave under the supervision of Chak Bolay Tok’, Lord of Julup (Sacul).” The text continues with information on a subsequent rite calling for the lighting of a fire on the 29th of August, AD 745, and a list of persons involved from Calakmul, Yokel, and Bax Tun.²¹ Such a fire ofrenda in our times could call for candles, copal incense, or the burning of ofrendas at the cave mouth. However, as Shesheña insists, “For the rulers of Caracol and Sacul it was extremely important to highlight . . . their performance of lighting a new fire at Naj Tunich, an undoubtedly foundational ritual.” He calls these pilgrims’ performative cave texts “a millennial tradition” and attends to their structure as “a Maya language of the underworld” enduring in the prayers and offerings made by ritual specialists at the mouths of caves in the region. In summary, Shesheña affirms the ongoing vitality of ancient energy-work: “These prayers are important because they transmit values, experiences, and the diverse modes of knowledge of their carriers, including the expression of an attitude of care that they have for the natural world which they consider as a living being that must be respected.”²²

Caves have been key sites for transmission of an elemental geopiety; however, as we have seen, ballcourts have provided portals to a cultivated chthonic realm, and thrones incised with cavernous niches at their base brought the cave pilgrimage’s authority to Olmec rulers’ courts at a time and place when intensive maize cultivation was supporting the rise of a Mesoamerican mother culture. Andrea Stone has written of how Mesoamerican regional elites constructed “surrogate cave shrines” within urban ceremonial space by placing enclosed structures atop “surrogate mountains”—pyramid or mound temples—in a built environment: a sacred geography translated for staging public performance defining “the nature of space, religion, and power.”²³ Across the Gulf rim, dark-zone ts’íib, ball grounds, and sequestered sites atop (and beneath) mounds or pyramids have contributed to archives of underworld pilgrimage, renewal, and divination. Whether through cross-Gulf/riverine contacts or through direct instruction from the maize-sown earth itself, Mesoamerican and Mississippian peoples developed similar structures of ritual authority. Gulf-rim peoples developed similar “sites of return,” as Chadwick Allen has described how Nanih Waiya mound and cave have supported “human behavior that crosses and re-crosses space and time, seasons and generations, the living and the dead” for Choctaw and ancestral Mississippian communities.²⁴ In terms of Gulf ballgame cultures, we are reminded of the importance of Homecoming (see fig. 5).

By the early nineteenth century, Cherokee peoples faced crises in terms of holding onto ancestral lands targeted by a territorially ravenous U.S. republic. As tensions grew between accommodationists and traditionalists, Cherokee innovator Sequoyah grasped the need for developing a syllabary for the writing of Cherokee in a manner adapted to the language. He continued work on the syllabary while living in Willstown (contemporary Fort Payne), Alabama, a town near several caves, including one now known as Manitou Cave—containing numerous inscriptions in Cherokee syllabary. Far into its dark zone, several cave-wall writings in Cherokee syllabary signed by “leaders of the stickball team on the 30th day in their month April 1828” (see fig. 6) testify to the team’s handling of pregame ceremonies in place and time, deep in the cave.²⁵ Ahead of a ballgame, Mooney (1900) writes that stickball teams would go into seclusion where players could “go to water” and cleanse “their bodies and minds with water and smoke, dancing, scratching, and praying” as competing towns or community factions put energies and desires into contestation.²⁶ A second set of inscriptions in this part of the cave likely comes from intermission or post-game rites, with one dark-zone text translated as “we who are those that have blood come out of their nose and mouth” and a signature from “Richard Guess,” identified as one of Sequoyah’s sons.²⁷ With pregame ceremonies undertaken almost a mile past the cave’s entrance, we may suspect considerable tensions in play around this 1828 match ahead of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Since stickball was regarded as a traditionalist practice and faced opposition from missionaries encamped in the community, the team may have felt a particularly strong need for dark-zone ritual seclusion in its preparations.²⁸

Another set of inscriptions in Cherokee syllabary is located closer to the cave’s entrance, but it is high on the ceiling and refers to ceremonial matters that the archaeological team, including Eastern Band and Keetoowah Band Cherokee researchers, has refrained from publishing in translation.²⁹ This ceiling writing is inscribed backwards, “as if addressing readers inside the rock itself” with the attestation “I am your grandson.” The writing that follows remains purposefully untranslated. Here the cave is an underworld homecoming archive, invoking a vast range of “Old Ones” through the spatial-temporal world of Cherokee territory. These texts are signed in syllabary by “Sa-Sa,” translated as “The Goose,” a name which appears in syllabary in a nearby cave and in the 1835 Cherokee census.³⁰

Stickball medicine-leaders probably chose the cave’s most remote areas for pregame rites because of the efficacy of such sites and waters for their preparation, but missionary influence regarding stickball as a threat to Christian cultural models could have been in play.³¹ Something of the energy of “Beloved Woman” Nancy Ward may have circulated behind the stickball teamwork in Manitou Cave. Ward had helped to petition the Cherokee National Council in 1817 to “keep your hands off of paper talks” since any agreement to removal from sacred lands would, as the women put it, “be like destroying your mothers.”³² Sa-Sa’s reversed inscription to the Old Ones, directed into the face of the rock, reaffirms relation to Cherokee lands and cosmogonies—“I am your grandson”³³—in a manner similar to the Choctaw hymn LeAnne Howe associates with Nanih Waiya: “Because you are holding onto me, I am not dead yet.” This homecoming embrace elucidates what Jace Weaver has called the “psychic homicide”³⁴ driving Andrew Jackson’s 1830 State of the Union Address, in which Jackson incredulously asked, “Is it supposed that the wandering savage has a stronger attachment to his home than the settled, civilized Christian? Is it more afflicting to him to leave the graves of his fathers than it is to our brothers and children?” The President summons geopiety’s other, demanding “separations from everything animate and inanimate” that would keep us from ranging “unconstrained in body and mind.”³⁵ Here, freedom’s unconstrained separations widen a cosmic zombie-gulf, presenting, as Katherine McKittrick describes the numbing legacy, “our presently ecocidal and genocidal world as normal and unalterable.”³⁶

It seems that freely ranging Death-Settlers (re)appropriated Gulf ballgame cultures and created their own postseason matchups named after the New Xibalba’s products of colonial extraction: Cotton, Sugar, Orange, and even Tobacco and Corn Bowls. Even against this darkly desacralized modern setting, spectacle ballplay may be among the most vitalizing elements of public culture across the north-shore “Gulf South.” Ballgame culture has had such profound reach that it provides what we could call originalist constitutional readings of the greater Gulf region. As Sara Ladrón de Guevara asserts, “The ballgame in which use of the hands was forbidden is a fundamental element of Mesoamerica,” while LeAnne Howe observes that “the game served as a unifier connecting the upper, middle, and lower worlds of the Southeastern cosmology.”³⁷ Perhaps the most powerfully unifying game-center may be found in the Veracruz site of El Tajín (see fig. 7).

4Tailgating with the Death-Lords

With its twenty-one ballcourts near the Huastecan northern edge of Mesoamerica, El Tajín, was a likely site of quarterly pilgrimages—around solstices and equinoxes measured from the 365-niche Pyramid of the Niches—during an era of climate change (AD 850–1100) when it served as a regional capital of ceremonial ball-culture.³⁸ Tajín’s splendid South Ballcourt—with its vertical sandstone walls carved in panels at each endzone—depicts pregame rites in the south endzone, with musicians as well as an eagle-figure and skeletal death god perched over a pot of ritual drink. The northwest endzone panel depicts opponents in ball-gear facing off: two contestants on either side of the ball, each player with his deity “mascots” behind: here identified as a Rain God against a Dog likely representing Venus, with a Death-Lord spectating on the side, hovering over a pot of pulque (see fig. 8).³⁹ The northeast endzone shows the game’s sacrificial end with a panel opening fully to the Underworld for one of the game’s ballgear-clad contestants.

The ballcourt’s two midfield panels center the liminal space, depicting what scholars describe as a dual deity and likely patron of the games. In this image, competing figures face off, their legs extending horizontally on opposite ends, arms hardly visible, their forms elongated, almost like a single snake (see fig. 9). One blissed-out laughing visage comes together from a composite of the two players’ profiled faces (see fig. 10). Ladrón de Guevara identifies this dual figure as Quetzalcóatl, Mesoamerica’s feathered-serpent: unifier of the underworld and aboveworld, associated with Venus (in morning star manifestation and appearing in dual or adversarial role with Tlaloc, deity of the rains).⁴⁰ Wilkerson reads the figure as an expression of the ballgame culture’s layering of ceremonial practice, with attention to these deities, underworld preoccupations, and an emergent pulque cult converging. He proposes that the South Ballcourt may have staged a scripted passion play “between the gods, impersonated by the players. Venus inevitably loses and goes to the underworld. There, during his nine-day stay, proper entreaties are made to the deities that control and make pulque.”⁴¹ Different ballcourts may have been devoted to different ceremonial or lineage authority, all negotiating power relations among the regional elite. As Wilkerson frames it, “since rulership and status are constantly reaffirmed in all societies, it is natural that those governing the Tajín state would seek to do so through visible cult participation; what better way than in the ballgame?”⁴²

The anthropologist’s question presupposes another: Perhaps those governing states in the modern South would seek to do so through highly visible ballgame-cult participation, aligning boosters and Greek networks with estate and gambling interests around an exuberant tailgate deity? Played out as spectacle and removed—even in the Grove—from the geopiety that fostered a sense of being “children of the corn” or “cornbread nation,” something of the games’ unsettled spirit has morphed and remains.

“My Football Team is Winning,” the opening refrain of a recent sequence of poems by Florida State/Clemson alum Dorsey Craft intones,⁴³ each invocation channeling spirits of cavernous stadiums from Tallahassee to Clemson’s Death Valley. With coaches’ severance payouts running as high as $76.8 million, football success stands as the mission for universities given over to the rot of billionaire-stage capitalism and generative AI. There’s a difference of scale and spirit between the Gulf’s north shore and the beísbol and fútbol stadiums farther south in Veracruz and Campeche. But if we could follow the lay of the land across deeper time, we might see that games played in invocation of the Feathered Serpent, Venus, and the Four Directions have had ways of shaking super-stratified systems down to Earth when things get out of whack. Dark-zone archives hold the long record, and the wayward call of going to water remains—moving us to a womblike matrix of life, “an anti-container container”⁴⁴ that shifts shape and eludes capture while leaving its trace on limestone and sandstone cave walls and in books as seemingly far afield as the Popol Vuh and, as we discuss in our full essay in Record, Document, Archive, Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend.