How it began
The vases were made in the lower Ulua Valley of northwestern Honduras during the Late to Terminal Classic period, about 600 or 650 to 800 or 850 CE. A 2007 study by Christina Luke and Robert Tykot in Ancient Mesoamerica compared carving styles with stable-isotope signatures of the stone and concluded that production was centralized at the site of Travesia, using one specific marble source. The authors state that older traditions of carving marble vases in the valley guided the choice of stone.
How it works
Each vase was cut from one piece of fine white marble, including the two handles that project from opposite sides. George Byron Gordon of the Penn Museum described handles in the form of paired animals, a larger cat-like one gripping a smaller one. The wall is divided into bands, with a main zone of scrolls and abstracted animal features in low relief. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes a base drilled with openwork and borders that look like overlapping scales or feathers. Gordon noted the lines were cut freehand.
How it spread
The Metropolitan Museum of Art states that the vessels became prized after about the seventh century and were exported as luxury goods as far as the central Maya lowlands, islands off Belize and Costa Rica. It suggests they held chocolate or other ritual drinks. Luke and Tykot argue that Travesia, which was not a political capital, used the vases to mark its identity at home and abroad.
What lasted
Luke and Tykot use the vases to argue that luxury craft production in the valley grew from social ties among communities, without a rise in central political authority, unlike other parts of the Maya world. Gordon wrote in 1921 that the vases showed skill and artistic merit unsurpassed among the ancient peoples of the Americas.
Where it stands today
Examples excavated on the banks of the Ulua River in 1896 and 1897 are in the Penn Museum, and others are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan notes that recent archaeology has identified a distinct culture in the region with ties to southern Central America as well as to the Maya.
