Chama Style Vessel, Maya Art and Architecture, 1999

Chama (Chamá) is a small Late-Classic Maya highland site, situated in the

Chixoy River The Chixoy River or Río Chixoy is a river in Guatemala. The river is called Río Negro from its sources in the highlands of Huehuetenango and El Quiché until it reaches the Chixoy hydroelectric dam (located at ), where the Río Salamá and Ri ...

valley of the

Alta Verapaz Alta Verapaz () is a Departments of Guatemala, department in the north central part of Guatemala. The capital and chief city of the department is Cobán. Verapaz is bordered to the north by Petén (department), El Petén, to the east by Izabal ...

department of Guatemala, some fifty kilometers north-west of San Pedro Carchá. Small-scale excavations were carried out in the early twentieth century by Robert J. Burkitt of the Pennsylvania University Museum. The site belongs to the periphery of the lowland Maya kingdoms. It has been argued that Chama was colonized from the lowlands somewhere at the beginning of the eighth century and then developed its characteristic, but short-lived Classical ceramic style. Chamá-style cylindrical vases have black-and-white chevron motif bands painted around the rim and base, with a bright white, and strong red-and-black palette, applied to a distinctive yellow to yellow-orange background. Rather than with scenes of courtiers and warriors, they are often decorated with humanized animals, deities, and mythological scenes. The anthropologist Elin C. Danien produced studies of the Chamà vases in the Penn Museum, which is exceptional for having provenance information for the specimens in its collection.

References

{{coord, 15.7417, N, 90.3663, W, source:wikidata, display=title Maya art Maya sites in Guatemala