Excavations at the ancient Maya city of Naachtun, in northern Guatemala, have yielded a one-of-a-kind artifact: a patolli gameboard that, instead of being made by carving into plaster as all other known examples were, was created by inlaying hundreds of red ceramic fragments into fresh mortar like a mosaic. The find, published by Julien Hiquet and Rémi Méreuze of the French CNRS in Latin American Antiquity (2025), throws new light on how the Maya incorporated games into their architectural spaces and daily life.
Naachtun was a powerful Classic period (ca. CE 250–900) city situated between Tikal and Calakmul. Excavations in one of its grand residential compounds, Group 6L13, uncovered the mosaic board embedded in the floor of Structure 6L-19. The surrounding architecture indicates that this building once belonged to a wealthy or influential household, perhaps even to a local administrative center.
The board, found beneath later construction and partly obscured by a wall, clearly predates the room’s final phase. Unlike the roughly scratched patolli boards documented elsewhere across the Maya lowlands, this one was built intentionally into the flooring, indicating that it was part of the structure’s original design.
The patolli consists of tiny tesserae—1–3 cm sherds of red and orange pottery—set in a rectangular layout crossed by a central axis, the traditional Mesoamerican board pattern. A digitized reconstruction shows that the board probably measured about 80 × 110 cm, with close to 478 tesserae arranged in some 45 squares. Many fragments came from worn household vessels, including Early Classic types such as Dos Hermanos Red and Aguila Orange.
The red coloring may have been as symbolic as it was practical: in Maya cosmology, red is associated with the east, a direction linked to rebirth and the rising sun. Indeed, some scholars suggest that patolli boards often appear in the eastern sectors of Maya compounds—an alignment echoed at Naachtun.
Patolli is a game known from later Central Mexican sources but was widely played across Mesoamerica; among the Maya, it had both entertaining and ritual meaning. Carved examples on palace benches and temple floors, such as at Seibal, Uxmal, and Xunantunich, suggest it was played by elites in social or ceremonial contexts. Its cosmological symbolism linked its players through play to the movement of the heavens, yet it was probably also used as recreation, a common pastime that reinforced community bonds.
The embedded design of the Naachtun board implies an installation that was deliberate and long-term, rather than casual graffiti or a short-lived pastime. By embedding it into the architecture itself, the builders planned it to outlast generations, perhaps serving both social and spiritual functions.
This artifact is doubly exceptional because floor mosaics are nearly unknown in ancient Maya architecture. Making the board entailed gathering hundreds of small, uniformly colored fragments and painstakingly embedding them in plaster, far more time-consuming than the relatively quick incising of most boards.
Because it was built into a newly laid floor, archaeologists can confidently link the creation of the gameboard to a particular construction phase, which roughly dates to the fifth century CE. This secure context makes it one of the earliest known Maya examples.
The Naachtun discovery expands our understanding of how games were integrated into Maya life and architecture. It shows that patolli boards could be planned as enduring features rather than casual additions, hinting at the social importance of gaming in Classic Maya society.
Future excavations at Structures 6L-19 and 6L-20 will establish whether the area was roofed or open, which may reveal more about the setting in which this intricate board once hosted its players.
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