Pots with fancifully molded eyes, noses and mouths were one of the tip-offs.
An archaeologist at the University of Chicago, Chase leads excavations of residential sites in and near the ancient Maya city center of Caracol in what’s now Belize. This city once sprawled across valleys, hillsides and hilltops. At its height, Caracol stretched 240 square kilometers, about the size of Milwaukee, before it was abandoned and swallowed by the forest.
Accumulating archaeological evidence had convinced Chase that shared social practices, such as placing pottery and other ritual items in special shrines, bonded groups of farm families into dozens of distinct neighborhoods within Caracol’s urban sprawl.
Consider those face-decorated pots. Varying shapes and spacings of molded eyes and other facial features added up to signature ceramic looks at different neighborhood-linked shrines. And those pots were just one element of a range of shrine offerings — including three-legged plates, curved jars with thin necks, and small medicine bottles and paint pots — that neighborhoods appeared to combine in distinctive ways.
2023-12-04 10:00:00
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