Among the long-standing features of Classic Maya Civilization, one of the most emblematic has always been the development and elaboration of an exceptionally sophisticated and complex technical and artistic tradition of naturalistic and conventionalized pictorial polychrome pottery making. While earlier studies focused on the substantive description and technology of Maya polychrome ceramics and their depictive decoration, more recent analyses have attempted to understand and elucidate the roles that such ceramics might have played in the economic, domestic, social, political, and ideological aspects of ancient Maya culture, and to determine just how they did so function. This thesis examines one small, specific body of Classic Maya polychrome pottery–the presumed output of a single production workshop or “school”–from both of these perspectives, and in so doing attempts to shed some small light on how finely painted pottery functioned in and enriched the lives of one regional Maya population living within the Belize River Valley of central western Belize over the centuries of the Late Classic Maya florescence from circa A.D. 590 to 990.
