Courtesy of Mexico’s ambassador to the US Esteban Moctezuma BarragánAnything could have happened to the vase as it sat on a shelf in Anne Lee Dozier’s Washington D.C. home.
A cat, dog, or any one of her three boys could have elbowed it onto the floor while roughhousing, and instead of ending up at Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology and History, the thrift store vase which was actually made by Mayan potters over 1,200 years ago would have been forever lost.
Backing up, the story began in 2019 when Dozier, who worked in Latin America for a human rights advocacy group, saw a decorative and old vase on the clearance shelf at the 2A Thrift Store in Clinton, Maryland.
Considering it would be “a nice little thing” to remind her of Mexico, and with a price tag of just $4.00, there was no reason to pass it by. Dozier thought the vase might have been decades old, but after a visit to Mexico City five years later, she noticed that the vases at the National Museum were strikingly similar to the one she had on her mantle at home, so much so that she asked a museum official.
The official recommended that she contact the embassy in Washington on her return, which she did. After examining the pictures, the embassy wrote back.
“I got an email saying, ‘Congratulations—it’s real and we would like it back,’” Dozier told the Guardian.
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“I am thrilled to have played a part in it’s repatriation story. I would like it to go back to its rightful place and to where it belongs,” she said, this time to WUSA, a CBS affiliate. “But I also want it out of my home because I have three little boys and I [would] have been petrified [if] after two thousand years I would be the one to wreck it!”
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Mexico’s ambassador to the US, Esteban Moctezuma Barragán, estimates that the case dates to between the 2nd and 8th centuries CE, dating to the Classical Mayan period when their civilization was at its zenith.
Anne Lee Dozier, middle, stands next to Mexico’s ambassador to the US, Esteban Moctezuma Barragán, right, at a ceremony during which Dozier returned an ancient Maya vase to Mexico. Photograph: Courtesy of Mexico’s ambassador to the US Esteban Moctezuma Barragán“It’s really important to recognize that some of these things, especially with such historical and cultural value to an entire country and people—you can’t really put a number on that,” said Dozier, adding that the feeling of playing a part in a nation’s cultural heritage was worth more than any amount she could have gotten at auction.
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