An terracotta plate, richly decorated, with a “kill hole” in tondo. The iconography of the bowl is centered on a skull in tondo, with four pairs of glyphs on the red-painted interior walls and narrow black bands demarcating the upper and lower bounds of the walls. The skull recalls the Temple of the Skull at Palenque and other Maya artwork that recalls the cultural image of the trophy head. Trophy heads were a near universal constant in Mesoamerican imagery for millennia, although by the Classic Maya period it seems more likely that the taking of actual trophy heads had (mostly) been replaced by the ball from the ballgame (in the Popol Vuh, a decapitated head is used instead of a rubber ball). Size: 13.25″ W x 2.25″ H.
