A Woman Bought a Used Vase for $3.99—and It Turned Out to Be an Ancient Mayan Treasure

You never know if an old trinket could be a priceless piece of history.

• A Maryland resident purchased a vase for about $4 on a clearance rack at a local thrift store, and kept it in her home for a few years.
• Upon visiting the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, she recognized that many of the artifacts resembled the vase she had at home to a remarkable degree.
• An authentication process confirmed her vase to be roughly 1,200 years old, and from the height of the Mayan reign.

A $4 vase sitting on a Maryland thrift store clearance rack looked interesting to Anna Lee Dozier, so she decided to make the purchase. It took about five years for Dozier to discover that this inexpensive addition to her household collection was in fact a roughly 1,200-year-old Mayan artifact.

She was a bit surprised, but not so much so that she was unsure what to do, promptly returning the vase to the Mexican government for its inclusion in the country’s museum collection.

Dozier, who works with communities in Mexico as a human rights advocate for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, saw the vase in the 2A Thrift Store near the checkout counter and was drawn to the Mexican-feeling design.

“It did look old to me, but not old-old, like 20 to 30 years old, maybe,” Dozier said of the original find, according to NPR. “I could see that it had some kind of link to Mexico, in terms of what it looked like, and since it’s a country that I work on and it’s really important to me, I thought it would be just a nice little thing to take home and put on the shelf and to remind me of Mexico.”

That reminder took a real turn when, a few years later she visited the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City while on a work trip. “Some of the things I was looking at looked awfully like what I had at home on my shelf,” she said.

That’s when she started the process of looking into authentication—first talking to skeptical museum staffers before they asked her to contact the Mexican embassy in Washington, D.C. She stuck with it, sent photos and measurements of the vase to the embassy team, and was told via email that it was the real deal. “I got an email saying, ‘Congratulations—it’s real and we would like it back,’” she said.

Experts believe that the vase dates between 200 A.D. and 800 A.D., during the height of Mayan influence. Dozier was more than happy to put such a find in its rightful place.

“Giving it back feels so much better than it would if I put it on eBay and I got a bunch of money,” she said. Dozier told WUSA that she’s “thrilled to have played a part in its repatriation story.”

Esteban Moctezuma Barragan, ambassador of Mexico to the United States, posted on X, (formerly Twitter) that “a valuable witness to our Mayan history returns home,” and that thanks to Dozier, the “historical gem” will get integrated into the country’s museum collections.

“I would like it to go back to its rightful place and to where it belongs,” she told WUSA, “but I also want it out of my home because I have three little boys and […] I was petrified that after 2,000 years I would be the one to wreck it.”