What a find!
A woman from Washington DC paid $3.99 for a thrift-store vase only to discover it was a 2,000-year-old priceless artefact.
Anna Lee Dozier bought the Mayan Vase in a thrift store in Clinton, Maryland five years ago, not realising its history and authenticity.
Experts believe the vase was made by Indigenous Mayan people in Mexico between 200 and 800 CE.
Dozier told WUSA9 that she believed the vase to be a 20-30-year-old tourist reproduction of Mayan-style pottery.
It wasn’t until January of this year, when she visited Mexico’s Museum of Anthropology that she realised the museum’s Mayan pottery looked like the one she had in her home.
She approached one of the museum’s employees to ask how she could repatriate the vase to them but found the employee to be sceptical and told her it was a common question.
Dozier contacted the US embassy who assisted her in getting the vase, which turned out to be a ceremonial urn, back to Mexico.
Mexico’s ambassador to the USA, Esteban Moctezuma Barragan thanked Dozier for her generosity.
The vase has now been integrated into the museum’s collection of Mayan antiques.
Un valioso testigo de nuestra historia maya regresa a su hogar
— Esteban Moctezuma Barragán (@emoctezumab) June 18, 2024#México.
Gracias a la generosidad de Anne Lee Dozier, ciudadana estadounidense, recuperamos una vasija clásica, datada entre el 200 y 800 d.C. Esta joya histórica será reintegrada al acervo del @INAHmx para… pic.twitter.com/ySsF1vCU5k
Dozier said she was relieved to have it out of her house as she has three young children and didn’t want to be the one to “wreck it” after 2000 years.
She said: “I would like it to go back to its rightful place and to where it belongs.”
Previously, an art collector in Texas discovered a 2,000-year-old Roman marble bust in a Goodwill store which she bought for $35.
The bust formerly resided inside a full-scale model of a villa from Pompeii in Germany but was stolen during the Second World War. It took five years from the discovery to reunite the bust with its rightful owner. The art collector received a finder’s fee for the discovery.
