Bridging History and Prehistory: The Possible Antiquity of a Native American Ballgame

There is a growing demand for research that links Native American cultural practices to precontact ones, but few bridges between pre-and postcontact studies have been found. ¹ Archaeologists and historians usually portray "modern" Native Americans and prehistoric Native Americans as very different people because of the many social transformations that occurred between the pre- and postcontact periods. The purpose of this study is to begin to construct such a bridge through evaluating whether ballgames were practiced during the Mississippian period, which encompassed approximately the eastern Midwest, South, and Southeast from AD 1000 to 1500.

There have been many types of ballgames played in Native North America. Nine are described in Stewart Culin's Games of North American Indians. ² Two classes of these ballgames were practiced among southern and midwestern Native Americans in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries: ballgames with rackets and a ballgame called shinny, which was played with either clubs or bats. ³ Ballgames with rackets took multiple forms, but most were played on a field, and the purpose was to get the ball into a goal using a racket. ⁴ It was not uncommon for players to become seriously injured during matches. Shinny, on the other hand, was less violent than the ballgame with rackets. ⁵ Shinny involved hitting a ball into a goal, designated by either a post or blankets. ⁶ Ballgames with rackets were played predominantly by men, and shinny was played predominantly by women. ⁷ Both sports were practiced in the historic period in the same geographic areas that were once occupied by Mississippian people. ⁸

The sport that has received the most attention by Mississippian archaeologists is chunkey. Chunkey was played by rolling a disk or hoop across a level playing field. Some Native groups played the game by striking the rolling object with darts or arrows. The game could be played by individuals or teams. ⁹ Stone chunkey disks and hoops have been excavated throughout the Mississippian region, and these artifacts have served as indicators of chunkey's presence during precontact times. During the historic period, chunkey and the ballgame with rackets were played predominantly by males, but the actual play of chunkey was not very dangerous. ¹⁰

Several archaeologists have interpreted chunkey as a very popular Mississippian period game. ¹¹ This is primarily because of the widespread presence of chunkey stones and Mississippian copper plates that have engravings of people playing chunkey. ¹² Archaeologist Timothy Pauketat has argued that chunkey was the predominant game during the Mississippian period and that the ballgame did not become widespread until historic times. ¹³ In support of his conclusion, Pauketat reasoned that the prehistoric dataset contains many chunkey stones and no indicators of the ballgame, meaning that the ballgame must not have been played until the postcontact era.

I contend, though, that ballgames with rackets also existed during the Mississippian period and were played by many more Mississippian people than chunkey. The broader implications of this suggestion are threefold. First, ballgames may have had cultural and historical impacts in the Mississippian period of magnitudes equal to or greater than chunkey. Second, these games are nearly invisible in the archaeological record, and therefore we must look elsewhere for evidence of the precontact sport. Third, the divide between archaeological scholarship on Mississippians and historical scholarship on Native Americans may become less jarring through further archaeological investigation of the nearly archaeologically invisible practices documented through historical and anthropological scholarship, but also through admitting the limits that archaeology has for understanding these practices in prehistory.

In this paper the ballgame with rackets will simply be referred to as the "ballgame." The subsequent section evaluates both the historical sources of southern ballgames and the archaeological record during the Mississippian period. The final parts of this paper further elaborate the implications of the ballgame's presence in prehistory.

The Social Role of Ballgames

Written records indicate that among Cherokees ballgames functioned as a form of entertainment very similar to many modern-day American sports. Spectators rooted for the home team; players shouted war whoops and taunts. ^14...