Maya Ceramics

There are many different types of styles and cultures that affect the work of ceramics. One type of culture that was very interesting was the Pre-Columbian Maya culture of Mesoamerica. The natural environment that the Mayans lived in offered a wealth of materials and ideas to give works of beautiful art. “The Maya used ceramics every day, small cups for drinking vessels, tall cylinders for storing and pouring ritual beverages, and plates for all sorts of delicious foodstuffs, from tamales to corncakes served with sauces” ( Miller 190). The Maya had specific techniques and shared similarities with the ancient Greeks regarding how they formed their own clay slips.

http://www.arthistoryclub.com/art_history/Maya_ceramics

Maya period is divided into the earlier Maya culture is called Formative or Pre Classic (2000 BC-AD 300), the Classic period goes from AD 300 to AD 900, and subsequent civilization is known as Post Classic (AD 900-conquest). Maya pottery gives affirmation of their religion and complicated mythology. Amid the Classic Maya AD 250-850, painting was a principal articulate aesthetic medium. Most of this benefaction has been depraved as paintings were fabricated on surfaces that have not survived, like the fresco paintings on the exterior and interior walls of Maya buildings and paintings on cloth and paper. Only Classic Maya painting is the pictorial polychrome pottery that survived because of its intrinsic persistence and the cover provided by the funerary environments in which many were placed and the deep waste residue common to all Maya sites. Due to these paintings on ceramic that let us a glance of this rich artistic heritage as well as of the greatly classified élite layer of Maya society and the historical and mythological events that preached them.

The pictorial pottery was originated as a result of the increasingly complicated social, political and economic developments that distinguished the Classic Period. During the Early