Now that I have a blog/journal where I post periodically, I decided that the link to my journal should be more prominent than the link hidden away in the menu. So I added an icon on the homepage with a directly link here. In the process of creating the icon, I needed a cool animal motif from an ancient culture. Without hesitation I went straight to the MayaVase Database:

http://research.famsi.org/kerrmaya.html

And found a cute little monkey (perhaps a capuchin) for my Journal icon, since monkeys were considered scribes in many cultures:



The MayaVase database is one of my favorite places on the web. It is a searchable database of roll-out pictures of Maya ceramic pieces. The pictures were taken by Justin Kerr, a photographer turned archaeologist, with his invention, a camera on a circular rail that can take one single continuous picture of the entire surface of a ceramic piece. These roll-outs have been circulating around the Maya archaeology community for close to 30 years, but recently they have been uploaded to the FAMSI (Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc) website at http://www.famsi.org/. The developers have taken great pains to add keywords to each picture that relate to the content of the piece, so that the images are searchable.

So what is the big fuzz about Maya ceramics? Many cultures of the world make pots, so what's special about the Maya ones? Well, for one, Maya pots often are decorated with scenes of mythology and texts. This allows archaeologists to study Maya culture in a private medium instead of the Maya culture as depicted in stone sculptures which were meant for public display. Since the audience of the pot is more private, the themes and subjects are far more varied than the larger-scale stone media. Yes, the pots often depict mythological scenes, but also superimposed with scenes from courtly life, like an old god flirting with a young nubile goddess, while others gossip behind their back. Just like other people, the ancient Maya could not resist having some fun even when dealing with serious subjects.

In the near absence of Maya books (there are only four surviving Maya books), Maya pots are also the closest we can get to Maya literature. Some pots depict protagonists speaking in the form of texts attached via speech scrolls to the protagonists' mouths, not unlike the convention used in modern comic books. Many of these stories appear repeatedly in different pots from different locations, so they must be part of a common mythology, but perhaps with local variations.

And of the most amazing discovery found in Maya pots is that the style of individual artists can be recognized and traced across different works. Moreover, some artists actually signed their work. This means that artists were highly respected and valued individuals in Maya society, and their fame is such that their works were probably used as royal gifts.

But not only are the pots useful for our understanding of the ancient Maya, they are also amazingly beautiful. In the best pots, the figures were well-drawn, even down to the anatomical level in the best pots. I have seen them in person at various exhibitions and one thing that always strikes me is the diminutive size of the pots. What this means is that the black outlines on the drawn figures are extremely dedicate, probably no more than one or two millimeters.

On a final note, the MayaVase database, as well as many other Maya-related online resources, exemplify the scholarship of the 21st century, because they put the resources that in the past resided in the domains of dusty library shelves into the Internet. Through such sharing of scholarly information, not only do specialists in the field profit, but also the common public has a easier path to the world of the past.