January 14, 2023 Dr. Nicholas Hellmuth: “Patolli Game Boards: Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Mixtec, Aztec.”
This PowerPoint presentation of hundreds of images showed patolli game boards of the major civilizations of Mesoamerica. Nicholas unearthed one patolli game board while working at Tikal in 1965 (incised into the top of a bench in a palace he had been asked to excavate). Prior to working at Tikal he wrote a seminar paper for his Harvard course and found a Sky Band mixed with one patolli game board at Uaxactun. The rest of the presentation showed the different shapes of patolli game boards at other Maya sites, at Teotihuacan, Tula, and in Mixtec and Aztec codices. The patolli game was also played by the family of the Hero Twins in the book of the Popol Vuh.
Nicholas Hellmuth worked as a student intern for INAH at Bonampak to help carry equipment from landing strip in a Lacandon aldea many kilometers through the rain forest to Bonampak in the summer of 1963. He then helped for a week to set up their camp. He worked as an architectural recorder, photographer, and archaeologist for 12 months at Tikal in 1965 for the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. In 1970’s he formed FLAAR for improving the maps of Yaxha, Topoxte Island, and Nakum. Hellmuth specializes in advanced digital photography: had the first digital rollout camera (4×5-inch camera, German lenses, and tri-linear scan back). His rollouts thus can be printed up to a dozen yards or meters in length (over a 42-inches high). His focus in the current decade is iconography based on thousands of kilometers of driving through different ecosystems of Guatemala and hiking deep into remote areas to find and photograph all insects, birds, mammals, and flowers that appear in Classic Maya art. BA thesis: Harvard (Tomb of the Jade Jaguar at Tikal; MA thesis: Brown University (Teotihuacan influence still in the Late Classic); PhD, Karl-Franzens Universitaet, Graz, Austria (Iconography of the Surface of the Underworld). Guest Visiting Research Professor in Guatemala, Island of Malta, Museum of Ethnology (MINPAKU, Osaka, Japan), Rollins College, Brevard Community College and BGSU (Ohio). Currently director of 5-year project to study flora/fauna/ecosystems in the 21,600 square kilometers of the Reserva de la Biosfera Maya, Peten, Guatemala.
A recorded version for Members only is available at Meeting Archives.