Maya Blue is a colour that is more than a pigment; it had roles in status, ritual and performance, being daubed onto pots and people before sacrifice. Here researchers use experimental and historical evidence to discover how it was made, including direct scientific analysis of Maya Blue on a pot thrown into the sacred well at Chichén Itzá. The results indicate that the formation of the colour was actually part of the ritual.

Maya Blue is an unusual blue pigment consisting of a clay-organic complex of indigo and the unusual clay mineral palygorskite (also called attapulgite). Used on pottery, sculpture, and murals from the Preclassic to Late Colonial periods largely in Mesoamerica, blue was the color of sacrifice and ritual. Did the palygorskite used to make Maya Blue come from a restricted source in Yucatán like Shepard, Arnold, Arnold and Bohor believed, or from widespread sources like Littmann argued? This report presents the results of a pilot study comparing INAA and LA-ICP-MS analysis of 33 palygorskite samples collected from different parts of the Maya area. These data reveal that it is possible to discriminate mineral source locations, and that it should be possible to determine whether the palygorskite used to make Maya Blue came from widespread sources or was traded widely from one or a few sources. Consideration of contextual information such as agency, landscape and language suggest that the Shepard/Arnold/Bohor hypothesis is more plausible than that of Littmann. No matter which hypothesis is supported, however, each has significant implications for the relationship of the diffusion of Maya Blue (or the knowledge of its production) to Maya social organization.

Maya Blue is an unusual blue pigment used on pottery, sculpture, and murals from the Preclassic to the Colonial period. Until the late 1960s, its composition was unknown, but chemists working in Spain, Belgium, Mexico, and the United States identified Maya Blue as a combination of indigo and the unusual clay mineral palygorskite (also called attapulgite). A source of palygorskite in the Maya area was unknown for years; then ethnoarchaeological research in the mid-1960s demonstrated that the contemporary Maya recognized the unique physical properties of palygorskite and used it as an additive for pottery temper and for curing certain types of illnesses. Because of its importance in Maya Blue, pre-Hispanic sources of the mineral were then suggested based on ethnoarchaeological data. One of these sources was the cenote in the town of Sacalum, Yucatan. This paper briefly reviews the history of the Maya Blue research from an anthropological perspective and presents evidence of a second possible pre-Hispanic mining site for palygorskite at Yo' Sah Kab near Ticul, Yucatan. Archaeological and technological approaches have demonstrated the use, distribution, composition, and characteristics of Maya Blue, but ethnoarchaeology has related it to Maya language and culture and to possible pre-Hispanic sources of one of its constituents, palygorskite.

An earlier study (Rice 1977, 1978a) purportedly found compositional similarity between raw materials used by modern potters in the northern Valley of Guatemala and Formative period whiteware ceramics from sites in the valley, particularly the major highland center of Kaminaljuyu. The compositional similarity suggested that Formative whiteware was manufactured in the northern valley, and this inference in turn underpinned a model of the development of ceramic craft specialization. Methodological weaknesses in the earlier study cast some doubt on its conclusions. More recent compositional analyses of Formative whiteware indicate that, while whiteware probably was made within the zone from which Kaminaljuyu drew its ceramics, it almost certainly was not made within the northern Valley of Guatemala. The present study highlights some important technical and methodological advances in compositional studies made over the past decade.

This paper describes the contemporary clay mine at Hacienda Yo’ K'at, Yucatan, and documents the archaeological association of a restored sherd-tool of Puuc slateware in a collapsed tunnel of the mine. The shape of the sherd and its in situ position suggest that it was used to gather clay in the mine during the period of A.D. 800-1000. The paper suggests the relationship of these data to the neutron activation studies of Yucatan pottery and their contribution to the study of ancient Maya trade.

The emic cultural categories of pottery materials used by the community of potters in Ticul, Yucatan, were compared to the etic mineralogical analysis of these materials. The study reveals that there is a definite relationship between the cognitive ethnomineralogical system used by the community of potters in Ticul and the verbal, non-verbal, and material aspects of the process of selecting and using raw materials for making pottery. This relationship indicates that the Ticul potter has a sophisticated understanding of his raw materials and suggests several implications for archaeology: (1) the cultural patterns which are manifested in the artifacts may be cognitive; (2) since potters’ discriminations are manifested in the physical world, it should be possible to reconstruct ancient emic categories from physical contrasts in the artifacts without the use of ethnographic analogy; (3) the definition of temper as nonplastics may eliminate important cultural information from archaeological consideration; and (4) the community of potters is the unit of population which uses a particular ethnomineralogical system and would be expected to produce a paste and slip combination which is relatively uniform. All of these data indicate that many of the notions of cognitive anthropology can be successfully applied to archaeological considerations.