In October 2021, the archaeological salvage conducted at the works of the mayan trainallowed the discovery of a vessel with elaborate hieroglyphic inscriptions. Currently, the sum of its archaeological and epigraphic study, as well as the conclusion of its restoration, allows researchers to unveil its narrativehidden for more than a thousand years.
The vessel was found associated with a plate and is dedicated to a character called Cholom, a nobleman who was already recorded in other ceramic pieces that associate him with the elite of the ancient city of Oxkintok.
According to archaeologists from the INAH Center Yucatan and coordinators of the ceramic analysis of the Mayan Train Project, Iliana Ancona Aragón and Sylviane Boucher Le Landais, the piece was found near the town of Maxcanú, and stands out for having been located in its original archaeological context, inside a pre-Hispanic residential construction, identified as Structure T3_ 18518.
This vessel is joined to another similarwhich the specialists called the ‘Vaso del Sajal’, also discovered in Section 3 of the train project, which goes from Calkiní, Campeche, to Izamal, in Yucatán.
The translation of archaeologist Ricardo Mateo Canul allows us to read: “The man says, on its surface, it has been carved, in its bowl or cajete, in its glass, for atole, from Cholom, the sajal”.
For researchers, Cholom’s noun phrase can be translated as ‘one who loosens’, because cholin Mayan, means ‘untie’, and om refers to the person who performs said action.
“The sajal is the one who transmits. They were not rulers but nobles educated to be able to write and read the glyphs, as well as to communicate aloud the orders of the ruler. aww or ruler”, explains Ileana Ancona Aragón.
It should be noted that in the Regional Museum of Anthropology of Yucatan, Palacio Cantón, in Mérida, another vessel is preserved in which the nominal glyph of Cholom appears, with the difference that it is identified as oopsthat is to say ‘hearer’, in Spanish.
Although it is still unknown whether the vessel and its plate had a ritual or daily use function, given that laboratory studies need to be combined with the contextual observations of archaeologists in the field, both elements reaffirm their belonging to the Chocholá style.
The two pieces discovered in Section 3 of the train date from the Mayan Late Classic period (600–800 AD). The newly restored vessel measures 8.5 cm in height by 21 cm in diameter at its mouth, while the plate measures 11 cm in height by 32 cm in diameter.
Already registered in the databases of the INAH, join 40 complete objects and more than 80 thousand fragments of vessels recovered in that section of the Mayan Train.
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