Lords of the Milpa: A Vase from Belize and the Maya Ninth-Century Political Crisis

Abstract Photographs of a previously unpublished Maya vase, smuggled out of Belize in 1979, reside in the Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. This vase, alongside dozens of others that I cataloged in the Dumbarton Oaks archives, is an example of the so-called “Holmul Dancer theme” in Maya ceramics. Re-examining this tradition in light of the new information from the vase, and from other recent discoveries, reveals how ceramic artists of the early ninth century used the dancing maize god as an allegory for the political landscape they witnessed rapidly changing around them. The vase also provides a case study in the potentially salubrious outcomes of archival and provenance research on looted materials. Should the vessel ever re-emerge, this research provides supporting evidence necessary to repatriate it to Belize.