Offering bowl full of copal incense and jade beads, found at the bottom of the Sacred Cenote in Chichen Itza. Mexico, Maya civilization, 1300-1450 AD [1800×1780]

[Museum](https://collections.peabody.harvard.edu/objects/details/295873), [Museum](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/722176). Remarkably well preserved by the oxygen-deprived environment at the bottom of the Sacred Cenote, this ceramic bowl was found filled with twenty pellets of copal—a tree resin used as ritual incense—and five jadeite beads of various shapes. In this distinctive testament of Maya devotion, the materials symbolically unite the clay of the earth, the sap of the tree, and the green of maize.