Five oddly expressive clay figurines, made on the edge of the Maya world about 2,400 years ago, were probably used as puppets in public rituals to commemorate mythical or real events.
“They would have either represented actual personages, or they were generic ‘media’ for rituals connected to rulers,” says archaeologist Jan Szymański of the University of Warsaw.
Szymański and his colleague Gabriela Prejs unearthed the puppets near the top of a ruined pyramid at the San Isidro archaeological site, a little under 50 kilometers west of San Salvador. The soil layer containing the puppets dates to about 400 B.C. But such figurines may have been used throughout the Maya