Samplings: May 2008

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The underside of copal incense that filled a Maya tripod pottery bowl shows evidence that helped solve mysteries surrounding the ancient production of pigment known as Maya Blue.

Linda Nicholas; Courtesy of The Field Museum

Almost 2,000 years ago the Maya concocted a pigment, since dubbed Maya blue, which has endured the harsh climate of southern Mexico on murals, pottery, and sculptures. Archaeologists, however, never determined how or where the pigment was manufactured, even though they ascertained its chemical composition in the 1960s. Now researchers suggest that residents of Chichén Itzá, an archaeological site on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, ritually produced the pigment right before offering human and material sacrifices to the rain god Chaak. While looking through artifacts at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Dean E. Arnold, an archaeologist at Wheaton College in Illinois, discovered a clay bowl, five inches in diameter, that had been retrieved in 1904 from the Sacred Cenote, a ceremonial well at Chichén Itzá. The bowl was flecked with bits of palygorskite clay and indigo dye—the chemical constituents of Maya blue—and was filled to the brim with hardened copal, an incense made from tree sap. Arnold and four colleagues realized that burning the copal could have provided the low, steady heat required to form the durable chemical bonds in the pigment—and that priests may have daubed it on sacrificial victims prior to cutting their beating hearts from their bodies. Along with incense and more than a hundred human skeletons, the well contains a fourteen-foot layer of blue sediment. (Antiquity)