A University of California, Berkeley anthropology professor has advised that the four ollas in previous posts are of the Santa Rita class of Ulua Polychrome tradition, 550 – 650 A.D., but never in association with human burials.
A friend excavated these ancient Lenca ollas from his property along with the bones of a long-buried skeleton: his wife made him get rid of the bones. This is the second site in the municipality of La Paz that I know of from which artifacts thousands of years old have been dug out of the ground. I haven’t yet visited the first site from which the other olla pictures which I posted earlier were discovered at a construction project. But tomorrow I will be visiting the excavation site that produced these two excellent pieces of ancient pottery, one completely intact. I will take pictures to help establish provenance.
During my recent journey to Honduras’ North Coast I lunched with my friend Bob at a favorite La Ceiba restaurant of mine on the Caribbean beach. Bob and I and a Honduran engineer rented a large house in La Masica back in 2009 before I was reassigned to La Paz. Bob is a Forestry Engineer who was with Canada’s equivalent of the Peace Corps. A former Canadian university professor he has dedicated his life to humanitarian projects all over the world. He had me laughing at incidents during his recent voluntary assignment to Malaysia. He was in Honduras on a temporary mission but is now based in Guatemala, where I last saw him at Lago de Atitlán in 2012 when I stayed at his house for a week and a half on my way to the Maya ruins at Tikal. Bob is the most selfless and dedicated, hard-working person I know. I am proud to call him a friend and fellow traveler. A true compañero.
On Cinco de Mayo (Viva Mexico!) I left La Paz to visit my goddaughter in La Ceiba. Several months ago when I visited Yelsi the highways were still in bad repair but signs of improvement were evident. A couple of years ago the government began installing toll booths at different points in the country’s highway system. This trip the change is dramatic. The highway that winds from the Comayagua Valley up over the mountains to the coastal plain is being widened to a four-lane modern transport system already crowded with commercial vehicles. Descending onto the coastal plain itself road maintenance crews are everywhere with heavy equipment operators moving tons of earth and raising infrastructucture to eventually extend the four-lane roadway up the coast. It appears the peajes are working wonders. As far as my search for the provenance of the ancient pottery discovered in La Paz is concerned, I have reached an impasse. The fellow who discovered the antiquities mother became ill soon after the discovery and has been hospitalized in Tegucigalpa. One must deal with reality, and wait.