My name is Andrew Turner, and I've been working as a postdoctoral associate in the Art of the Ancient Americas through a joint appointment in both the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art History Department.

We're looking at a four-legged vessel that has legs that are the heads of down-turned peccaries, which is a type of wild pig. The upper level shows a bird, which is probably something like a fishing bird, like a cormorant, that's actually pulling a fish out of the water.

It's made out of clay. It's painted with a thin diluted clay with pigments suspended in it, called slip. And then it's highly burnished or polished by smoothing it out with a smooth stone. So it almost gives the effect of being glazed, but it's actually not a true glaze. And all of the pigments have to be mineral-based because organic pigments don't survive during the firing process. They didn't really use kilns the way we think of today. They fired all their ceramics in pits. We don't really know a lot about workshop arrangements, and in fact, even a workshop archeologically is pretty rare to find in the Maya region.

However, we do know that, at later times, making fine ceramics like this was a high-status occupation. And in fact, we have another vessel here in the Gallery that's on display. It's got flowers on it, and it's got an inscription around the rim that said it was made by the nephew of a particularly important Maya city called Naranjo. So we do know that this was actually something that was carried out by—maybe not the king and queen themselves—but maybe relatives of the families. So we think of this kind of high-status artwork as being very useful for these rulers that want to help forge alliances by giving gifts of nice textiles and ceramics and maybe even stone sculpture. But we also think of the knowledge needed to make this sort of symbolic imagery and also the knowledge required to make hieroglyphic inscriptions. This is probably something that you would've had to have been highly schooled in, and you'd probably be somebody from an elite family.