TULA.- The sacred movement of the Mesoamerican ballgame is at the heart of a new exhibition at the Jorge R. Acosta Site Museum in the Tula Archaeological Zone, where visitors are invited to explore one of the most powerful rituals of the ancient world.

Titled The Ballgame in Tula: The Echo of Divine Movement, the exhibition examines the cosmogonic, political and ceremonial meanings of the ballgame, known in Nahuatl as ullamaliztli, and focuses on the importance of the architectural spaces where it was played in ancient Tollan Xicocotitlan. At its height, between 900 and 1150 CE, the city was one of Mesoamerica’s great urban centers, with an estimated population of 120,000 people.



Organized by Mexico’s Ministry of Culture through the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the exhibition presents recent research on the subject and forms part of the cultural and artistic activities connected to the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

During the opening, Manuel Villarruel Vázquez, director of the INAH Hidalgo Center, said the exhibition brings visitors closer to a sacred practice that was central to Mesoamerican social and symbolic life. The show opened this weekend and will remain on view for the rest of the year at the Jorge R. Acosta Museum.

Villarruel also announced that conservation work at the archaeological site is nearing completion, including the restoration of the protective roofs over the Coatepantli, or Wall of Serpents. He also marked the start of the program “Amaneceres arqueológicos” — Archaeological Sunrises — which allows visitors, with advance reservation at the archaeological zone’s ticket office, to enter the site before dawn from 4:30 to 7:30 a.m. on Saturdays through the first half of July to observe the sky.





Tula de Allende mayor Cristhian Martínez Reséndiz emphasized the importance of the site, noting that the municipality preserves the second-largest ballcourt known in ancient Mesoamerica. He added that the archaeological zone receives more than 120,000 visitors each year, making it one of the most visited heritage sites in the country.

One of the exhibition’s most striking works is a monumental ballgame ring from the Late Postclassic period, discovered in the 19th century in the atrium of the parish church of Santiago Apóstol in Atotonilco de Tula. Atotonilco de Tula mayor Yocelyn Tovar Mendoza thanked the INAH Hidalgo Center for the restoration work carried out on the piece, expressing hope that it may eventually return to its place of origin.

During a guided tour, archaeologist Luis Manuel Gamboa Cabezas explained that the exhibition, developed with the support of specialists from the Templo Mayor Museum, the Atotonilli Community Museum and Fomento Cultural El Ayate AC, seeks to show how the ballgame was far more than sport. It was a material representation of universal balance and the movement of the stars.

Ancient sources help illuminate that symbolic universe. The exhibition includes a reproduction of Plate 42 from the Codex Borgia, where a skull, or possibly a celestial body, appears to strike the walls, evoking the passage between life and death. Another key reference is a carved image on a pilaster from Building B at Tula, where the deities Quetzalcóatl and Tezcatlipoca — associated with day and night — call to mind the cosmic dimension of the ballgame.

Gamboa Cabezas noted that evidence of the ritual has been found in archaeological sites across Hidalgo, including areas of the Huasteca and the Altiplano, such as Tecacahuaco and Cerro del Ponzha in Ajacuba. The practice, he said, continued even into the viceregal period, where it coexisted with Christian crosses and dances.

The archaeologist also explained that the term tlachtli referred to the court or architectural enclosure surrounded by walls. Tula has two such spaces. One, located west of the main plaza, symbolized the road to Mictlan, the underworld; its nine interior steps evoke the nine levels of that realm. The other, known as the teotlachtli, or field of the gods, was the setting for rites and human sacrifices intended to preserve cosmic balance, as suggested by the presence of a central altar, fragments of a Chac Mool and its proximity to the tzompantli, or skull rack.

The exhibition is completed by objects that deepen the story of the ritual, including a representation of a ballplayer, a rubber ball, a stone-carved feline emblem, a portable marker used for open-field games and a skull showing signs of decapitation, linked to the ritual and recovered during a 2018 archaeological rescue project in the 16 de Enero neighborhood of Tula de Allende.

Through these works, The Ballgame in Tula: The Echo of Divine Movement presents the ancient ballgame not as a distant spectacle, but as a living key to understanding how Mesoamerican societies imagined power, sacrifice, death and the movement of the cosmos.