Posted on 12/04/2007 10:29:27 AM PST by blam
Rare Maya "Death Vase" Discovered
Blake de Pastino
National Geographic News
Updated December 4, 2007
An extremely rare and intricately carved "death vase" has been discovered in the 1,400-year-old grave of an elite figure with ties to the Maya Empire, scientists say.
The vase is the first of its kind to be found in modern times, and its contents are opening a window onto ancient rituals of ancestor worship that included food offerings, chocolate enemas, and hallucinations induced by vomiting, experts say.
Archaeologists discovered the vase along with parts of a human skeleton while excavating a small "palace" in northwestern Honduras in 2005. (The dig was funded by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.)
Soil samples taken from in and around the vessel were found to contain pollen from corn, cacao, and false ipecac, a plant that causes severe nausea when eaten.
These traces suggest the vase may have been used in ancient rites the Maya practiced to produce trancelike states through intense physical purging, said Christian Wells, an anthropologist at the University of South Florida who lead the excavation.
"The way to have contact, to communicate, with ancestors is to have visions," Wells said of the rituals.
"And you have a vision either by cutting yourself and bloodletting—which there's really no evidence for in this case—or by having some very powerful chocolate enema, or by drinking your brains out and throwing up.
"We think this beverage [in the vase] may have contained ipecac, which would have made the person who's drinking it throw up—a lot. Then, by throwing up a lot, they could've had visions that would have allowed them to talk with the ancestors."
Mysterious "Palace"
Wells' team believes that the white marble vase contained a corn-based gruel laced with the stomach-churning herb. Cacao, from which chocolate is made, may have been added for flavor.
The new findings could help solve the long-standing mystery of what purpose the ornamental vessels, called Ulúa-style vases, served.
Most of the vases known to scientists were either looted from graves or were unearthed long before modern archaeological methods were available, Wells said.
"It's really the first one that has ever been excavated [scientifically]," Wells said. "Until this case, we hadn't really had any idea about how these items were used."
Although the archaeologists may have uncovered the vase's purpose, they are still perplexed by where they found it—beneath a pyramid-like palace they discovered in a small, remote settlement in Honduras' Palmarejo Valley (see map).
Both the palace and the vase suggest a level of prestige that seems out of keeping with what was otherwise an unremarkable farming village, he said. It's not clear whether its inhabitants were ethnic Maya or members of another culture influenced by the Maya Empire, he added.
"Compared to other sites in the region, this one's pretty small, pretty unimpressive. So why is this very super high-status product in this burial in this residential building?"
The team suspects that the person buried beneath the palace was of historic importance to local residents, likely an ancestor figure whose death marked the end of an era.
"An ancestor is an important person who could've been a founder of the community or a founder of the lineage of the ruling family," he said.
The palace was built over the grave very soon after the burial took place, around A.D. 650, Wells said.
The vase was added to the grave about a hundred years after the burial, he added, likely to commemorate the ancestor's death.
"You typically see people digging up original ancestor figures and taking a relic bone or adding things to the [grave] and honoring them many years after they've died," Wells explained.
The nausea-inducing gruel that the vase likely held may have been drunk by a worshipper at such a ceremony, Wells said, or it may have been left as an offering to the dead.
But the most valuable gift may have been the vase itself.
A little larger than a coffee mug, the vessel is inscribed with sculpted scrolls and overlapping tiles resembling serpent scales, and each of its two handles is carved to resemble the head of a leaf-nose bat.
"These things were super labor-intensive to produce, and they had imagery that was very cosmically significant," Wells said.
The ornate vase may have found its way to the remote community through an ancient kind of social networking—in this case, by a valuable link to craftspeople who made these vessels in the Ulúa Valley, about a two-day walk away, Wells said.
"It could be that these kinds of marble vases ended up all over the place, and we just don't know because we haven't excavated them. But I suspect that there's something else going on here," he said.
"There's some special relationship that somebody had in this community with the producers of these vases over in the Ulúa Valley.
"This is something you would find in a Maya king's tomb," he added. "This is not something you would find in a very rural, backwater community."
Wells' colleagues Karla Davis-Salazar and Jose Moreno-Cortes presented the team's findings last month at the Southeast Conference on Mesoamerican Archaeology and Ethnohistory in Columbia, South Carolina.
Maize Beer
Christina Luke is an archaeologist at Boston University and an expert in Ulúa-style vases.
She said the discovery made by Wells' team is "very significant."
"Their vase is the best we have for really, really good context, excavated by professional archaeologists," she said.
Unlike vases unearthed a century ago, often by mining and railroad workers, "with this one, we know the exact context and where it was found," Luke said.
The pollen found with the vase seems consistent with ceremonial drinks used in ancient Mesoamerica, she added.
"It makes sense to me that the vase would have been used for some sort of consumption of a fermented frothy drink," she said. "I'd say either a maize beer or a chocolate drink or some combination of the two.
To suggest that the vase was used in a purging ritual, however, "is stretching things a bit," she said.
While ancient Maya are known to have practiced ceremonial enemas and vomiting rites, there's little evidence that they were performed in the region where the vase was found, she said.
"I don't know the data that you would draw on to say that there were definitely purging rituals [in that community]," Luke said.
"The ipecac may suggest that, but I'd be uncomfortable saying, Yes, it's 100 percent what's going on."
Wells agreed that it's not certain that the newfound cup held a vomit-inducing beverage based solely on the few grains of ipecac pollen found in it. But he said his theory is consistent with rituals conducted in the region, as depicted on painted vessels found from the period.
"We can only entertain the possibility and seek further evidence to evaluate the idea," he said.
His team plans to return to the Palmarejo Valley next summer to learn more about the site's role in the Maya world and to determine whether more vases or palaces might yet be discovered.
"My sense is that this vase is very unique to this special burial, this special building," he said.
"But I'm wondering now what would we find in these other buildings."
Question - If the Mayans couldn’t predict the collapse of their own culture, how can the predict the end of entire world?
Or flavored ipecac? Hunh? Reminds me of the fighter pilot who told (true story) his news guy passenger to eat a banana before the flight. When asked why, the pilot (call sign “Psycho”) said, “it tastes the same coming up as going down.”
Colonel, USAFR
Hey wait - I saw that vase on the Antiques Roadshow.
Somewhere in the middle of that, you gotcher regrettable actions that never have anything to do with communicating with ancestors.
“So, they can invent a calendar which is accurate and astronomy but they can’t invent alcohol or find a plant in the jungle which will get you high? Amazingly, virtually every other society managed to find or invent a hallucinogenic drug or plant somewhere.”
But they did have chocolate....
Chocolate tastes awful, til other things are added to it.
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"My first coffee cup! Now that brings back memories! Oh, the joys of youth..." |
A number of comments come to mind; none, however, that would get past the mods.
“Look, nurse, I like chocolate as well as the next feller but isn’t this getting just a little carried away?”
It resembles an ancient popcorn bowl.
Same could be said of whiskey, I am sure it is a aquired taste.
People can aquire a taste for chocolate that has no sugar added to it? Why would anyone wanna?
Well, they did add sugar, it seems.
In the New World, chocolate was consumed in a bitter, spicy drink called xocoatl, and was often flavored with vanilla, chile pepper, and achiote (known today as annatto). Xocoatl was believed to fight fatigue, a belief that is probably attributable to the theobromine content. Other chocolate drinks combined it with such edibles as maize starch paste (which acts as an emulsifier and thickener), various fruits, and honey. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate
Dollar General has all you could want, Made in China of course.
Ironically, the flowers found in it were dead as well....
But they did have chocolate....
And they put it in their butt......Eric Cartman would be proud.
Ta-kill-ya tends to have that effect on it’s victims.
“chocolate enemas”??
EW!
Champurrado
6 cups whole milk
1 cup masa harina (corn flour)
2 cups water
1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
3 ounces unsweetened chocolate, grated
1 cinnamon stick
1. Heat the milk and chocolate in a saucepan, stirring to dissolve the chocolate. 2. When chocolate is completely dissolved, remove from the heat and set aside to keep warm. 3. Mix the masa harina with the water in another saucepan; place over low heat, add the cinnamon stick, and cook until the mixture has thickened and the masa becomes translucent. 4. Add the chocolate milk and sugar. Stir to dissolve the sugar and simmer for a few minutes. 5. Remove the cinnamon stick and serve the champurrado hot in cups or mugs.
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