Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Ancient America’s Ball Game,” a look at the roughly 3,400-year history of the first known team sport, with Jeffrey P. Blomster, a professor of anthropology at George Washington University whose archaeological research focuses on the Mixtec, Zapotec, and Olmec peoples.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-ancient-ball .]

Nearly three and a half millennia before today’s ball teams took to the field, ancient Mesoamericans fielded teams to move a ball up and down a court. The details of this ancient game are lost in time, but it appears to have involved putting a rubber ball through a stone hoop. There’s evidence that it sometimes was played as a proxy for going to war, or involved wagers of children or lives, or human sacrifice.

Come learn what we know—and are still trying to determine—about the roots and history of such contests from Professor Jeffrey P. Blomster, whose archeological examinations of ancient ball courts in Oaxaca is helping shed new light on the game’s origins.

Dr. Blomster will explain how what is known as “the Mesoamerican ballgame” is not one game, but several similar ones, with the most widely played variation involving the use of the hips to move a rubber ball. They were played on ballcourts consisting of a long alley with an end zone on either side, ancient public architecture that, having been built from stone, in many cases remains somewhat intact today.

Intertwined with economics, politics and religion, such games played a crucial role in all pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica—a region that includes most of modern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The variations that we know most about were those played by the Maya and by the Aztec, who still played it at the time of the Spanish invasion but not well-documented. A game descended from the Aztec one, known as Ulama, is still played in the Mexican state of Sinaloa today.

Professor Blomster will discuss other scholars’ research on the ballgame and talk about how his own research on two early ballcourts in Oaxaca could have major implications for our understanding of it. Those fascinated by archaeology or by ancient Mesoamerican civilizations will have a ball hearing him speak. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: A Mayan ballgame in action as depicted on a Mayan vase. (Cropped from a photo by Justin Kerr / Mayavase Database / Public domain.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Baltimore Before Baltimore,” an archaeological journey into the lives of the Indigenous people who called the Baltimore region home for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, with Katherine M.S. Ahlrichs, associate professor of anthropology and director of the Baltimore Community Archaeology Lab at Towson University.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/digging-baltimore.]

Long before streets, rowhouses, and neighborhoods reshaped the landscape, Indigenous communities lived along the waterways and shores of what we now call Baltimore. Their history is often difficult to see in the modern landscape, but traces of their lives remain beneath our feet.

Join archaeologist Katherine Ahlrichs, who excavates throughout the region, for a journey through thousands of years of Baltimore’s Indigenous past.

Drawing on recent archaeological investigations at Herring Run Park in Baltimore City and North Point State Park in Baltimore County, Ahlrichs will explore what stone tools, pottery, food remains, and other archaeological evidence can tell us about the people who lived here long before European colonization.

You’ll learn how Indigenous communities used the region’s rivers, forests, and Chesapeake Bay shoreline. We’ll examine how their ways of life changed over thousands of years and how archaeologists piece together the stories of these past residents from evidence that can be remarkably subtle.

Along the way, Ahlrichs also will discuss what it means to practice archaeology in public parks and urban landscapes and how collaboration with Indigenous communities is changing the questions archaeologists ask and the stories archaeologists tell.

You’ll leave seeing familiar Baltimore landscapes differently—and with a much deeper sense of the human history beneath them. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Students in the Summer Maryland Indigenous Archaeology Program troweling at a Chapman's Landing site. (Photo by Katherine Ahlrichs.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “A Guide to Witches,” on the figure of the witch in history, legend, folklore, and fairy tales, with Linda Lee, lecturer in folklore and literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

[Doors open at 4:30 and the talk starts at 5:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-guide-to-witches ]

Get ready for something spellbinding: A look at various depictions of witches as reflections of ideas about female sexuality, independence, agency, and power.

Offering up this pre-Halloween treat will be folklorist Linda Lee, who earned rave reviews in previously giving this talk in Philadelphia.

We’ll start with an introduction to witches from European folklore, fairy tales, and legends. You’ll learn how they’re generally portrayed as powerful, solitary, and defiant figures who can be either helpful or harmful. They may appear as mothers, helpers who aid heroes on quests, or monsters to be vanquished. They can represent a threat to the community by snatching children or by pilfering cows’ milk.

Individual witches who will be conjured up include the child-eating witch from Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel” and Baba Yaga, the ambiguous witch of Slavic folklore who lives in a hut on chicken legs and flies around inside a giant mortar while clutching a big pestle. Lee contrasts such fictional depictions with the ideas about witches and witchcraft espoused by Christian demonological thought.

You’ll learn how witches are described by early modern sources like Malleus Maleficarum, the 15th-century treatise on witchcraft which also served as a witch hunters’ manual. Such texts presented witches as entirely malevolent figures who gain magical powers through a pact with the Devil (usually signed with menstrual blood). They depicted witches as using a special ointment that empowers them to fly to a Witches’ Sabbath to dance and perform demonic rituals.

You’ll see how such ideas were visually reinforced through engravings, woodcuts, and drawings, by artists like Albrecht Dürer, that depicted naked women riding broomsticks and dancing with devils.

You’ll come away with a better understanding of why witches are among the most versatile, notorious, and enduring figures from fairy tales and legends and remain an iconic part of contemporary Halloween traditions. Feel free to dress witchy if you wish. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: From “Preparation for the Witches' Sabbath,” by 17th Century Flemish artist David Teniers the Younger.

Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore presents: “The Power of Folk Horror,” an exploration of an especially creepy subgenre in folklore and film, with Joshua Barton, lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University and scholar of horror.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/metro-baltimore-folk-horror .]

What makes a horror film scare really stick with you? Sometimes, it’s not monsters or jump-scares but the eerie feeling that something ancient, something forgotten, is still lurking just under the surface.

That’s the heart of folk horror, a subgenre that blends folklore, rural isolation, and rituals gone wrong. It takes the past—the truly forgotten past—and makes it come roaring back to bite us.

Venture into the strange and fascinating world of folk horror with Joshua Barton, who has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans with excellent past talks on cryptids, ghosts, movie monsters, and other things that go bump in the night.

We’ll start by digging down to folk horror’s roots in classic British films like The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General, discussing how these stories introduced us to secretive villages, ominous woods, and old traditions that clash violently with the modern world.

We’ll move on to explore how folk horror has reemerged in recent hits like The Witch, Midsommar, and Lamb. What ties them all together? The feeling that history isn’t dead; it’s just been waiting.

Beyond the scares, this genre taps into something deeper. Folk horror asks what happens when we lose touch with our roots or when we get too close to them. It reflects fears about identity, nature, belief, and the things we can’t explain. And in an age of environmental anxiety, political division, and cultural upheaval, these stories are more relevant than ever.

By the end of the lecture, we’ll see that folk horror goes beyond surface-level eeriness. It’s a mirror for our collective anxieties and a reminder that the past is never as far away as we think. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.