Across Mesoamerica cities were organised around a ritual core of stepped pyramid-temples, plazas and a masonry ballcourt for the rubber-ball game, all aligned to cardinal and astronomical references. The I-shaped ballcourt, found from the Olmec heartland to Maya and Aztec cities, was charged with cosmological and political meaning, staging a contest tied to fertility, war and the movement of celestial bodies. This template recurred at Teotihuacan, Monte Alban, Chichen Itza and Tenochtitlan over two millennia. Its plaza-temple-court grammar defined the Mesoamerican civic centre.
It is a durable, widely diffused idea of urban order in which cosmology, ritual and politics fixed the plan of the city core. The ballcourt is among the oldest purpose-built sports and ritual structures in the world.