This tall bowl was once used as a drinking vessel by an important Ancestral Maya individual. Based on the style of the painting and the qualities of the clay, Maya scholar Dorie Reents-Budet suggests that the bowl originated from a region between Naranjo, located in the northeastern Petėn of Guatemala, and Altun Ha in northeastern Belize (personal communication, June 2023). The bottom two-thirds of the bowl are decorated with the heads of deities, placed against a dark background that implies a watery subterranean environment. Throughout Maya communities both past and present, sacred water-filled caves act as offering spaces and/or portals to Xibalba, the Underworld.

The top of the bowl is ringed by a band of glyphs that explains the vessel’s intended use. This type of expression is very common in ceramics dating to the Late Classic Period (600–900 CE). These phrases, known to scholars as the Primary Standard Sequence, are highly formulaic and appear frequently on serving dishes, plates, and drinking vessels from the Late Classic Period. They announce what kind of vessel the dish is and sometimes specify what it was used for. More detailed dedications might also include the name of the vessel’s owner as well as the name of the scribe who wrote the dedication. This vessel is extraordinary because it specifies that it was used for saká, a sacred corn-based drink, which is rarely seen in the corpus of known pots. (Matthew Looper, personal communication, October 2023; Carter and Matsumoto 2020, 89).