Last year, I had the opportunity to present my research on traditional and Indigenous games at the Association of Illinois Montessori Schools (AIMS) conference. The presentation drew a great crowd, and the questions and conversations afterward were just as interesting as the presentation itself. One of my favorite moments came when an attendee told me she had played one of the games I discussed as a young girl growing up in her home country. I had spent so much time researching these games, and here was someone who had actually grown up playing one of them! This article comes from taking the slides and notes from that presentation and turning them into something you can read if you weren't there.
What constitutes the historical record of a civilization? We examine its art, architecture, religion, food, music, literature, and technology. We study its buildings, ceremonial dress, beliefs, and social hierarchies. Historians and archaeologists use these artifacts to reconstruct the lives of people who may have disappeared thousands of years ago. But another kind of historical evidence deserves considerably more attention: games.
While researching traditional and Indigenous sports, I began noticing how much information we can extract from something as simple as a game's rules. Equipment might reveal a civilization's natural resources and technology. The playing field could tell us about its geography. The objectives might reflect social values, while the ceremonies surrounding competition could reveal religious beliefs. Games can even reveal military tactics, economics, social class, migration, and cultural identity. What if we treated games as primary sources?
The Magic Circle
In his 1938 book Homo Ludens, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argued that play is not simply a product of culture but an activity through which culture develops. His ideas are frequently discussed through the concept of the Magic Circle, a temporary world created when people agree to participate in a game.
Consider basketball. The three-point line is an arbitrary boundary that determines the value of throwing a ball through a suspended hoop. Everyone playing and spectating understands exactly what that line means. A player carrying the ball must dribble to move legally, and stepping on a boundary line can result in a turnover. Yet when the game ends, nobody cares whether you bounce a ball while walking across the court or step on a painted line.
For a brief period, everyone voluntarily accepts a physical environment governed by an invented set of rules, beliefs, and customs. The rules are artificial, but the consequences are real to the participants. Players experience cooperation, competition, conflict, fairness, responsibility, and consequences within this temporary social system. If games create temporary societies, perhaps the societies that created them have left their fingerprints on the rules.
The Mancala Effect
One of my favorite examples comes from Mancala, a family of games with deep historical roots in Africa and versions played worldwide. Most involve moving stones, seeds, or other counters between a series of holes or depressions. The rules vary considerably, but the basic mechanics remain recognizable. What interests me is how different cultures interpret those movements. Agricultural traditions use the language of sowing seeds. Other versions emphasize counting, collecting, or capturing pieces. Maritime interpretations may describe ports and boats, while pastoral imagery can describe pieces moving like livestock through a pasture. The same basic mechanics acquire different meanings depending on the people playing.
I call this the Mancala Effect (a play on the Mandela Effect): the tendency for games to absorb and reflect the experiences, values, and environments of the cultures that play them. Once we recognize this relationship, we can begin examining games through different cultural lenses.
Geography and the Environment
Where people live influences how they move. Cold climates produce skiing, skating, and ice games. Maritime cultures develop traditions in swimming, surfing, paddling, and boating. Mountainous environments reward climbing and endurance, while large open landscapes allow games to spread across enormous distances.
Australian Aboriginal games provide another perspective. Throwing games could develop skills relevant to hunting, chasing games required players to anticipate movement and evade pursuit, and tracking games encouraged careful observation of the environment. Not every game was designed for survival training, of course. Many were played simply for enjoyment. But the overlap between recreational activities and practical skills is worth examining.
In a Montessori environment, we frequently discuss the relationship between purposeful activity and development. Traditional games provide interesting examples of how enjoyable physical activity can also develop abilities valued by a community.
Materials, Technology, and Craftsmanship
Before industrial manufacturing, people built sporting equipment from available materials: wood, stone, bone, leather, plant fibers, animal sinew, and natural rubber. The construction of traditional lacrosse sticks required knowledge of wood selection, shaping, bending, and netting. Decoration and craftsmanship could carry personal or cultural significance. Modern sports generally standardize equipment to create competitive consistency, but traditional equipment operated under different circumstances. A particularly well-crafted stick could provide a competitive advantage, and that advantage was earned through the skill of its maker.
The Mesoamerican ballgame offers another example. Indigenous peoples in the Americas were producing rubber balls long before Europeans developed comparable equipment. Rubber's elasticity and bounce made possible games that would have been difficult to reproduce with other materials. The eventual spread of rubber technology beyond the Americas transformed sporting equipment worldwide.
Some traditional hockey-like games even used burning balls. Accounts of Beikou describe balls made from combustible materials, turning a familiar stick-and-ball activity into something that must have looked remarkably different from modern field hockey. A piece of sporting equipment can reveal far more than how a game was played. It can tell us about natural resources, technology, craftsmanship, and trade.
Seasonality and the Calendar
When a game was played can be as revealing as how it was played. Agricultural communities often organized celebrations and competitions around planting and harvest cycles, as work demands changed throughout the year. Other games became associated with religious calendars. Genna, a traditional Ethiopian stick-and-ball game, is connected to Ethiopian Christmas, while the ancient Olympic Games were part of a religious festival honoring Zeus. Chilean rodeo grew out of the practical skills of managing cattle and became tied to seasonal agricultural work and community celebrations. Games can preserve the rhythms of a society long after the circumstances that originally shaped those rhythms have changed.
Rules and Social Values
Rules can reveal what a society considers important. A game might reward individual strength, cooperation, protection, patience, or the ability to perform a specific role within a larger group. Seven Stones, played in various forms throughout South Asia, is one of my favorite examples. One team knocks down a stack of stones, then tries to rebuild it while the opposing team tries to stop them. Unlike many target games, where destruction or elimination is the objective, Seven Stones requires reconstruction.
Could that represent the value of rebuilding something destroyed? Could it symbolize a larger cycle of destruction and creation? We cannot confidently claim either interpretation as the game's historical purpose, but that doesn't make the questions any less interesting. As educators, we can ask students what they think the rules represent, how the game makes them feel, and what behaviors might develop from repeated play.
Other traditional games create similarly interesting social relationships. In Chab Kon Kleng, a Cambodian children's game, players assume the roles of a hawk, mother hen, and chicks. The mother hen must protect the chicks from the pursuing hawk. In Dibeke, a traditional South African game, boys and girls participate together in equal numbers. The rules determine which behaviors become necessary for success. Sometimes the game builds cooperation, protection, and responsibility directly into its rules.
Religion, Ceremony, and Cosmology
Traditional games provide remarkable examples of the relationship between physical activity and religion. The ancient Olympics honored Zeus, sumo incorporated Shinto purification rituals, and some Native American stickball traditions carried spiritual significance through their ceremonies and equipment.
The Mesoamerican ballgame may be one of the most dramatic examples. Played in different forms for thousands of years, it held an important place in several civilizations. Archaeological remains include elaborate ballcourts, equipment, sculptures, and depictions of players. The game also appears in religious narratives. In the Maya Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins confront the rulers of the underworld through a series of challenges, including a ballgame. Their story connects competition to death, rebirth, and the relationship between different realms of existence.
Ki-o-Rahi, a Māori game tied to the legend of Rahi, offers another fascinating example. The story involves a kidnapped wife, a journey through a dangerous landscape, spiritual guidance, conflict, and eventual reconciliation. Interpretations of the playing field connect its different areas to elements of the narrative, including ancestors, pathways, and celestial navigation.
In these traditions, the playing field could represent something much larger than the physical space it occupied. The game could preserve a story, reinforce religious ideas, or allow participants to experience a narrative through movement.
Warfare and Conflict Resolution
Games could prepare people for conflict, but they could also offer alternatives. Running, wrestling, archery, horseback riding, and weapon-based competitions developed skills useful in warfare. Cuju is historically associated with Chinese military training, while Roman soldiers played physically demanding ball games such as Harpastum.
Traditional stickball, played by several Native American nations in the southeastern United States, is sometimes called the Little Brother of War. Historical accounts document games used in disputes between communities, although the rules, ceremonies, and significance differed among the nations that played it.
The phrase interests me because it suggests that competition could express some of the tensions associated with warfare while providing another setting in which communities could confront one another. This does not mean games always prevented violence or automatically settled disputes, but it demonstrates how sporting competitions could occupy a much more important position in community life than recreational sports often do today.
The ancient Olympic truce provides a different example. Rather than ending all warfare throughout Greece, it established protections connected to participation in the religious festival. Games could prepare people for conflict, imitate conflict, and sometimes help manage it.
Rites of Passage and Adulthood
In many societies, young people were expected to demonstrate abilities associated with adulthood. Those might include hunting, riding, endurance, courage, or participation in communal responsibilities. Among Maasai communities in East Africa, lion hunting historically carried significance in some warrior traditions. Today, the Maasai Olympics provide an alternative that celebrates athletic ability while supporting wildlife conservation.
Horse raiding among some Plains Native American societies required exceptional riding ability, as well as reconnaissance, stealth, knowledge of animal behavior, and the ability to escape pursuit. It raises an interesting question about whether childhood chasing and invasion games could help develop some of those same skills. We can't assume this connection was universal, but it shows how games can mirror the practical challenges of adult life.
Power, Social Class, and Spectatorship
Who was allowed to participate in a game, and who was allowed to watch? Roman gladiatorial contests provide a revealing example. Gladiators could be enslaved people, prisoners, or professional fighters, while seating arrangements reflected Roman society's social hierarchy. Those performing the dangerous labor were often of lower status than those watching. Other games became associated with royal courts and aristocratic privilege. Kemari developed strong connections to Japanese court culture, while certain forms of Cuju were played in elite Chinese settings. Equestrian sports required access to horses and resources many ordinary people lacked.
Modern professional sports are not entirely removed from these relationships. Athletes create the spectacle, while owners, leagues, broadcasters, and sponsors organize and profit from it. Sport can provide extraordinary opportunities for social mobility, but access to coaching, facilities, equipment, and competition is rarely equal. Even gambling, often discussed as a modern intrusion into athletics, has accompanied sporting competitions in many societies for centuries. Games can reveal who possesses power, who performs the labor, and who benefits from the spectacle.
Migration and Cultural Exchange
Games travel with people, and they rarely remain unchanged. British and European bat-and-ball traditions such as Stoolball, Rounders, Cricket, and Wicket inspired Townball versions played in America and shared features with games that eventually developed into American baseball. Rather than a simple chain in which one game directly became another, the history is better understood as a complicated family of related activities that influenced one another over time.
Horses provide another remarkable example. Europeans' reintroduction of horses to the Americas transformed transportation, hunting, warfare, and sporting traditions among numerous Indigenous peoples. Equestrian skill became central to the lives of some Plains nations, while horse-based competitions developed throughout the Americas. Sometimes games change because people migrate. Sometimes they change because new materials or animals become available. Sometimes different cultures independently develop remarkably similar activities. The similarities are interesting, but so are the differences.
Colonization and Cultural Survival
The cultural importance of traditional games becomes particularly apparent when we examine what happened during colonization. Colonial governments and institutions frequently attempted to replace Indigenous languages, religions, educational practices, and social structures. Recreation and physical activity were not exempt. European sports spread through colonial schools, military institutions, missionary organizations, and administrative systems. In some places, traditional games lost participants as colonial sports became more prominent. In others, colonial authorities discouraged games or separated their cultural meanings from the activities themselves.
Today, Indigenous communities continue to play, adapt, and revitalize traditional games as expressions of cultural identity. Ulama maintains a living connection to the ancient Mesoamerican ballgame in Mexico. Xikunahati, associated with the Pareci people of Brazil, has been featured in contemporary Indigenous sporting gatherings. Traditional stickball continues through tournaments and cultural events organized by Native nations in the southeastern United States and Oklahoma.
These games are not simply historical artifacts. They remain part of living cultures, and continuing to play them can become an act of preservation. As we recognize Indigenous Peoples' Day, it's worth remembering that cultural preservation extends beyond what we typically study in history books or display in museums. Languages, stories, music, art, and ceremonies are all important, but so are the games people have played for generations. Sometimes preserving a culture means preserving the opportunity for the next generation to play.
Indigenous Peoples' Day Weekend
Much of this research eventually became my Traditional and Indigenous Games Collection for Montessori Physical Education, which includes 36 comprehensive lesson plans totaling more than 400 pages.
In honor of Indigenous Peoples' Day, I'm offering the collection at a discounted price through the long weekend. If you're interested in bringing these games and their histories into your classroom or PE program, you can explore the collection below.
