Reusing objects is a fundamental way people connect with and honor their past. Maya kings, like many who serve Thanksgiving dinner on their grandmother’s best china or pin her favorite brooch to their dress for a special occasion, employed heirlooms as a means of memorializing and hearkening back to those who came before. “Reusing an object or a material wasn’t just a practical way to maximize their utility for the Maya,” says archaeologist Juan Carlos Melendez of the research unit Archaeology of the Americas in France. “There was purpose and intention behind it.” Likely around a.d. 635, Maya artists in the city of Calakmul, capital of the Kaanul, or Snake, Dynasty (ca. a.d. 200–736) gathered greenstone, or jade, ornaments, including earspools that been worn by earlier Kaanul rulers. Such earspools were carved to resemble flowers, a motif that embodies the sweet cacao breath of the deceased and the Maya idea of the Flower World, the realm of the dead. These artists then began to carve the ornaments into about 100 small pieces, or tesserae.
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