[Aztlan] MAYA BLUE SECRETS UNRAVELED

[michael ruggeri]

Listeros,

The journal Antiquity has in its online version today that Dean  
Arnold and a team from Wheaton College and the Field Museum have  
unraveled the mystery of Maya Blue. They believe the Maya cooked the  
pigment in ceramic bowls over burning incense. Arnold has studied a  
small bowl from the cenote at Chichen Itza that the Field Museum has  
held for decades. The bowl contains traces of polygorskite, a clay  
mineral, indigo and copal. The invention of Maya Blue took place in  
500 CE and required the fusing of the three elements over a slow, low  
heat provided by copal incense in ceramic bowls.

When Thompson dredged the large cenote at Chichen Itza, he found a 14  
foot layer of blue silt at the bottom but no one studied its  
significance. Now it appears Maya Blue was made at the edge of the  
cenote during priestly rituals.  Now the team is studying other  
objects from the Sacred Cenote in the Field collection to find out  
the exact portion of indigo that was used.

This is the value of having artifacts sitting in museum collections  
for a long time and at some point, technology is sufficient that  
major breakthroughs can be made from unused artifacts.

Elizabeth Graham of the Institute of Archaeology at University  
College, London said that Dean Arnold is probably the main person in  
the world today in the field of Maya ceramics and production and this  
proves it.

The Santa Barbara News Press has the story here;
http://www.newspress.com/Top/Article/article.jsp? 
Section=NATIONAL&ID=565251819938644016

I have made a tiny URL here;
http://tinyurl.com/2onx5h



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