What should I do with this ancient Maya pot?
When a relative died, I was given an extraordinary artifact—and a head-spinning journey down a 25-year ethical rabbit hole.
As a kid, I loved rummaging around my uncle’s makeshift museum. Wilfred Sylvester was an enthusiastic amateur historian and collector of remarkable artifacts, and he had transformed two rooms of my grandmother’s house in Louisiana into an extensive gallery. Revolutionary War flintlocks and Civil War muskets lined the walls. Glass display cases held 400-year-old French Bibles and Confederate dollar bills. There was a miniature replica of a Roman catapult next to a German World War I helmet with the spike on top. But the item that captured my imagination most was a small pot no bigger than an orange. It had a human face molded into the terra-cotta and a hole bored through the rim, suggesting someone had once worn it around the neck. The pot was Maya, and I imagined an artist using it to hold paint for elaborate temple murals, or a healer using it to transport medicines. My uncle knew how captivated I was by this little vessel. When he died in 1999, he left it to me.
Most of the items in my uncle Wil’s collection were displayed with written explanations as to provenance, purpose, and historical context, information he gathered from exhaustive research. But the write-up accompanying the pot contained only two bits of information. First, it was given to my uncle by his neighbor, a Norwegian anthropology graduate student at Tulane University, in the 1960s. Second, it was said to be of the Maya Classic Period, from A.D. 250 to 900, a fact Wil likely gleaned from the Norwegian. Now that it was in my possession, I had questions. Was the pot authentic? How had it been obtained? Who was this mysterious Norwegian? Most important, was I—then a 34-year-old white guy in Atlanta—the rightful owner of this Maya artifact?
I wrote to the Middle American Research Institute at Tulane for answers. Experts there looked at pictures of the pot and confirmed that it was Maya and authentic. Also, they said the Norwegian was probably Finn Wilhelmsen, an anthropologist who, after leaving Tulane, taught for years at Chapman University in Southern California.
I sleuthed around and learned that Wilhelmsen was nearing retirement and living in Playa del Rey, in Los Angeles. When we spoke on the phone, he immediately remembered both my uncle and the pot. He explained that in the 1960s he visited Guatemala regularly for research among highland Maya communities, and Guatemala City was like the Wild West of antiquities trading. Vendors were selling pots, urns, masks, you name it. Here’s where the story gets problematic: Wilhelmsen bought loads of pieces, some for himself, some as gifts. He gave a large, ceremonial plate lined with hieroglyphs to his undergraduate alma mater, Bates College in Maine. As for my uncle Wil’s pot, he bought it from a German vendor at a shop next to the Pan American Hotel. “All of this was common,” he said. “No one thought anything about it.”
He likely didn’t realize this was illegal, even in the 1960s, because when I asked if he had any ethical uneasiness, he said: “I’m more concerned about such things now. Back then I didn’t know any better.” But he also assured me that as a precaution, he took every piece he purchased to Guatemala’s National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and received written permission to remove it from the country. He just wasn’t sure where the permission slips were now. When I asked if he would mind if I returned to Guatemala with the pot to discuss its provenance with officials, he began to sound nervous. He listed all the reasons why this was a terrible idea. An overzealous bureaucrat might harass me. The pot might be confiscated. Or maybe—and this seemed to be his primary concern—his role in the pot’s exportation all those years ago would become an issue. “Look, I don’t want any flak. I don’t know if they would act retroactively or not. So I just wouldn’t mention it.” By the end of the conversation, Wilhelmsen was casting doubt on whether he had given a pot to Wil at all.
My talk with Wilhelmsen did not inspire confidence. The ownership question gnawed at me. A pot that had been used by a great civilization many hundreds of years ago in a place of soaring pyramids, elaborate temples, and fabulous royalty was now sitting in my modest Atlanta bungalow gathering dust. Even if Wilhelmsen had done everything by the book, the situation felt, at best, weird and, at worst, like I now possessed a stolen artifact. After a few days of reflection, I decided I would take the pot to Guatemala and search for its rightful owner. Maybe that was the museum Wilhelmsen mentioned, or a notable Maya archaeological site like Tikal. If I couldn’t figure it out, I would bring the pot home, assuming airport security didn’t discover it in my luggage and jail me for antiquities trafficking.
But months passed, then years, and I never took the trip. The only thing more troubling than possessing the pot was not possessing it. Whenever I held the curious little vessel in my palm and examined its curves and ridges, I pictured my uncle delighting visitors in his enchanting museum. Taking the pot to Guatemala likely meant parting with it, and that would be like parting with Wil.
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As it was, by 2007 I already had an emotionally draining relationship with Guatemala over something completely unrelated to the pot. My wife and I were adopting a little girl, Marcela, from an orphanage in Guatemala City, but the process had become hopelessly stalled. Over three and a half years we visited her a dozen times. At one point I moved to the country to meet regularly with government officials and lived for six months in the orphanage with Marcela and 35 other children. We finally brought her home in 2011.
By then I had purchased a museum-style stand to display the pot, but I still felt uncomfortable about having it, and so it lived mostly in a box in my closet. Around the same time, a contentious struggle was unfolding internationally over artifacts stolen from their countries of origin. Egypt had demanded the return of the Rosetta stone from the British Museum and the burial mask of Ka Nefer Nefer from the St. Louis Art Museum. Neither complied. Among other arguments, the British Museum insisted that such relics belong to everyone, not singular nations. But in other instances, repatriation efforts succeeded. Sweden returned the G’psgolox totem pole to the Haisla people of British Columbia. A collector in Buenos Aires returned a giant stone moai to Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York sent the Euphronios krater back to Italy.
The little pot in my closet was no Rosetta stone. Still, it had cultural value, and I couldn’t imagine I had a stronger claim to it than the seven million contemporary Maya people. When I learned in 2012 that the Brooklyn Museum had started repatriating 2,286 pre-Columbian artifacts to Costa Rica, I dusted off my plan to take the pot to Guatemala.
For guidance on where to go and who to speak with once I got there, I called Arthur Demarest, an expert on Maya archaeology at Vanderbilt University who lives part of the year in Guatemala. He predicted what would happen: Authorities would confiscate the pot and send it to the national museum. “Unless it’s beautiful, it will end up in the basement,” he said. “The museum has no room for even the sexy stuff.” Meanwhile, at archaeological sites across the country, the government was losing battles to armed looters who were using stone saws to slice off the faces of monuments and invade pyramids. Compared with what cultural officials were facing, Demarest said, the little pot my uncle had given me would mean nothing to them. He explained that collectors have for years used this very argument to justify holding on to artifacts. But, while many countries do face steep challenges, he said, that’s not a reason to keep ill-gotten objects. He called it a “muddy situation.”
After I hung up, I unboxed the pot, placed it on its stand, and gave it a long look. It belonged in Guatemala, absolutely, and I knew that one day I would return it. Still, if what Demarest said was accurate, there was a decent chance it would live the rest of its life ignored and unloved in a storage closet in a basement. I needed time to get my head around that. Once again, despite pangs of guilt, I nixed my travel plans.
In 2020, when Marcela was in middle school, she asked to have her DNA tested. She figured she possessed some degree of Indigenous heritage, but she wanted details. When her DNA packet arrived, she spit into the plastic vial and popped it in the mail. Six weeks later she had her answer: She’s 91 percent Maya. Maybe you can see where this is going. Why wouldn’t the pot belong to her? My thinking was not unlike that of the Smithsonian Institution, which, since the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, has been returning the hundreds of thousands of artifacts in its possession to Native nations across the United States. I decided to give the pot to Marcela.
There was no pomp and circumstance to this transfer. I just told her one day. For a kid who’s mostly concerned with her friends and her phone, I’m surprised I got a response at all. “That pot’s probably cursed,” she said, no doubt referring to the three white guys who had held on to it for the past 60 years. Then she returned to her phone.
Recently, I explained the pot’s journey to several Indigenous experts on repatriation, including Brian Vallo, an Acoma Pueblo tribal member with three decades of experience in cultural resource management and historic preservation. “It sounds like an item of importance to your family,” he said. “And for you to be able to go full circle now with your daughter, who has found out she is a descendant of Mayan people and culture, it landed in the right hands.” Vallo’s main concern was whether the pot had been used in association with burials. Native nations have a wide variety of religious traditions, but broadly speaking, many believe that when a body is buried with any ceremonial or sacred objects, those items shouldn’t be disturbed. If this pot had been part of a burial, Vallo said, Marcela and our family would want to consider repatriating it.
So I got back in touch with Demarest, who has conducted more than 30 years of archaeological fieldwork across the jungles and highlands of Central America. The man has pulled a lot of artifacts out of the ground. I showed him photographs of Marcela’s pot. “This is probably Preclassic,” he said, meaning sometime between 2000 B.C. and A.D. 250. He discerned this from the vessel’s simplicity and lack of decorative paint, qualities that also indicated it likely wasn’t associated with a burial, as tomb pots tended to be flashier and elaborately painted. He also reckoned it was probably found in a cave, where the climate and isolation had preserved it well. Archaeologists had discovered tens of thousands of artifacts in caves, he said. “Caves were holy places; they still are,” he explained. “They’re the entrance to the underworld. People go in and do rituals for their ancestors.” The pot may have been used to hold pigments or herbs associated with those rituals, he speculated, and if so, Marcela’s little pot “is something that probably had great importance.”
We’ve recently begun installing special shelving and lighting in the living room to display Marcela’s pot. My now 17-year-old daughter still seems ambivalent about this object I’ve spent the past 25 years obsessing over, which isn’t to say she doesn’t embrace her ethnic heritage. After volunteering at her orphanage last summer, she returned home with a brightly colored Maya weaving, a stole to wear over her robe when she graduates from high school. She’s also planning to get a tattoo of a quetzal, Guatemala’s national bird and icon, on her shoulder blade. Maybe one day the pot will come to have a similar cultural meaning for her. Until then, it will occupy a prominent spot in our living room, holding the bits and pieces of her past, and mine.
