Kane’s lucky he wasn’t the Mayan team captain

Holiday greetings from Mexico, where once upon a time if you lost a game you could lose your head

Iwas in Mexico on holiday last week, where the country has just voted in a new president, a populist, Left-wing son of shopkeepers. Businesses are nervous. “Amlo”, or Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to be proper, has previously opposed foreign investment in Mexico’s oil industry and is an admirer of Fidel Castro. But in office, as Mexico City’s mayor, he was pragmatic, and has indicated he won’t start raising taxes and nationalising everything.

Similarly, he has vowed to defend the rights of Mexican migrants in the US and loudly condemned Donald Trump’s “racist” policy of separating migrant children from parents. But after a congratulatory call from the US president, he said: “We are not going to fight… We are going to extend our frank hand to seek a relation of friendship.”

The border is the hottest issue, but Amlo and Mr Trump also need to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. This should be possible, assuming that Mr Trump doesn’t want to fight a trade war on every front at once. Mr Obrador’s direct style is at least more likely to win respect than his predecessor’s prevarication.

There is one thing he and Mr Trump can agree on: it would be better if Mexico relied less on the US and if fewer Mexicans felt the need to leave their homes and go north. The most important policy determining that will hinge on whether Amlo can fulfil his promise to crack down on corruption and get Mexico’s house in order.

As a rule, I avoid World Cup matches unless and until England reach the final. Unfortunately, in Mexico, the game was blaring out everywhere, so I broke my rule and recalled why I never watch sports.

I can understand the appeal, though. Football is the closest we get to gladiatorial combat nowadays, an idea on my mind after spending the week visiting ancient ruins. Mexico was home to one of the world’s first team sports, a kind of basketball dating to 1,500BC, whose brutal rules make a mockery of modern games.

For one thing, the biggest court ever found, at the Mayan ruin of Chichen Itza, is twice the size of a football field. Players had to get a nine-pound rubber ball through a stone hoop a good 15-20 feet above them.

Whacking it with a foot or hand was prohibited, so play was all about the hip thrust, with the occasional nudge from a racket. The costumes put football strips to shame, too. A court carving depicts two teams in their gear: enormous, plumed headdresses, decorative collars and tasselled garters. Like modern fans, the audience of priests, warriors and royalty, dressed up, usually as jaguars or eagles. The game they were watching, however, had a much more dramatic climax.

At the centre of the carving are the two team captains. One of the captains is holding up a knife and, in his other hand, the decapitated head of his rival.

Archaeologists are still arguing about whether this shows the losing side’s leader getting the chop or whether it was the winner’s honour to sacrifice himself. Others maintain it’s a metaphor for cutting the harvest’s first head of corn.

I’m no expert, but given that the Mayans hunted rival warriors in order to carve out their hearts and offer them to the sun on cloudy days, the grislier interpretations seem more likely. So however bad Harry Kane feels, it could be worse.

Mexico City’s Anthropological Museum is a model of how history everywhere should be taught.

We start, in room one, with the evolution of man, then move to the Neolithic age and trace migrations of hominids across the Bering Straits into the Americas. The focus narrows gradually and chronologically as the great civilisations of Mexico emerge: the Olmec; the Teotihuacanos; the Toltec; the Aztecs; the Mayans; Gulf Coast tribes, Oaxacans and others.

The museum wastes no time on grand theories or moralising. It does not gloss over uncomfortable facts, like the use of slaves, the fashion for mass human sacrifice bequeathed by the Toltec, or the Aztecs’ extreme militarism. It displays impressive feats of artistry, science and engineering, from the Aztec “sun stone” to the Mayans’ ability to predict eclipses. It uses reconstructions of temples and marketplaces judiciously, to give a sense of scale, without being tacky. And the signs (at least, those in English) are mercifully free of jargon.

This straightforward, factual chronology, which is so out of fashion in museums (and schools), allows a layperson such as myself to learn without the hindrance of curatorial foibles, unnecessary academic concepts and overbearing value judgments. The only regret is that this approach is now so lamentably rare.

In spite of its museums, Mexico’s history has unfortunately become a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. So much so that at Teotihuacan, one of its most impressive ruins, curators have installed a sign: “Pyramids built for aliens?” it says, then answers: “No. For humans.”