It is the discovery of the millennium – or rather the second. It turned out to be much more than that. The vase was 2,000 years old, and its
Anna Lee Dozier’s talent for secondhand shopping near her home in Washington, DC, paid off. She was at a thrift store in Maryland in 2019 and found a vase on sale for just $3.99.
“I saw this vase and assumed it was a reproduction for tourists,” said Dozier The Independent“It looked old, but I thought it was a 20 or 30 year old tourist reproduction.”
It turned out to be much more than that. The vase is two thousand years old. Her frugal find was indeed priceless.
After finding the vase in the bargain bin, Dozier kept it at home for five years, she said, and didn’t think much more about it until she took a trip to the Mexican Museum of Anthropology in January. There, Dozier said, she saw vases that reminded her of her thrift store find, so she asked the staff what she should do if she might have an artifact.
Museum staff asked them to contact the US embassy.
“I came back to DC not believing it could really be anything, and I didn’t want to bother the embassy, so I googled some professors who were experts in Mayan or Mexican history,” she said. The IndependentWhen no one responded, Dozier contacted the embassy, where staff asked her to send detailed pictures of the vase.
A month later, Dozier learned that it was a ceremonial urn from the Mayan community dating to between 200 and 800.
After learning she had acquired a priceless ancient artifact, Dozier contacted the Cultural Institute of Mexico, where a ceremony was held on Monday to return the vase. It will now be taken to the Mexican Museum of Anthropology for analysis.
Dozier, a human rights activist for Mexico’s indigenous communities, said she was happy to accompany the vase on its journey home.
“Human rights extend to culture and history,” Dozier said at the event on Monday.
Dozier is not the first person to accidentally stumble upon an ancient artifact.
In 2017, an Italian marble expert discovered a 2,000-year-old Roman mosaic that had been used as a coffee table in a Manhattan apartment for the past 50 years.
The apartment owners said they had no intention of buying the table from an Italian noble family in the 1960s. It has since been returned to the Italian government.
