Baking Pot Codex Restoration Project, Belize

Goals of Conservation and Technical Analysis

Description of the Artifacts

The artifacts, identified as Artifacts R, S and T survive only as paint fragments. The material to which the paint had originally been applied is absent, and is presumed to have been of organic origin, now decayed. All fragments are extremely fragile and break with minimal pressure. As a result, they are generally extremely small, most with a surface areas of a few square millimeters.

All of the paint fragments are made up of two principal layers: a pigmented layer, and a preparation or ground layer to which the pigment layer is well attached. A variety of colors were noted during preliminary examination, including various shades of green, red and white, plus blue and black. Six different types of ground, distinguishable by color and surface texture, were noted, including white (4), red and light brown; the red ground was subsequently determined to be an intermediate layer with the brown.

Our assumption is that fragments forming a discrete paint layer are presumed to have a ground layer in common, although their pigment applications may differ according to areas of the design. Texture observed on the exposed surface of a ground layer is a possible indicator of the original now-decayed organic substrate material. Stacked fragments oriented ground-to-ground would suggest that they had been applied to each side of a shared substrate, while fragments oriented paint-to-paint would suggest contact between two painted components (either of the same object or two different objects).

Goals of the Project

The goals of treatment were to identify the artifact(s) through an investigation of structure and decoration, to reconstruct as much as possible of individual paint layers, and to stabilize and protect the remains for future study and long term preservation [see Audet 2003]. These activities would focus on Artifact R components, as the largest most complete deposit.

The goals of the technical study were to identify the composition of the paint and ground, to elucidate technical aspects of the decorative process, and to determine the original organic substrate, from evidence preserved in the loose paint flakes.

The features of the paint fragments and the deposits themselves, as well as their excavated condition, bear some resemblance to a paint deposit excavated in 1989 at the site of Cerén, El Salvador, initially thought to be the remains of a codex [Beaubien 1993]. While these were identified through conservation and technical study to be the remains of a painted gourd (others were subsequently found at the site), they provided the first evidence of this class of artifact. Information derived from the treatment and technical study of the Baking Pot artifact(s) will similarly be used to draw inferences about their nature. Because of the unusual survival and even rarer archaeological recovery of painted organic artifacts, these remains offer valuable evidence to add to the growing body of knowledge about these types of objects from Mesoamerican contexts [Shepard 1946; Grant 1999; Fash et al. 2001; Beaubien and Beaudry-Corbett 2002].

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