Lamanai is a most unusual Maya site: strung out along the western shore of a freshwater lagoon on the New River in northern Belize, it has length without much breadth. A series of massive temple-pyramids break the skyline, interspersed with areas of low-lying settlement. Its history is similarly odd, beginning in the mid-second millennium BC and persisting well into the late-second millennium AD. Two successive Spanish mission churches were built in the sixteenth century, followed by a colonial British sugar mill, and human occupation continued pretty much unbroken thereafter. Victorian explorers named this settlement Indian Church but its Maya name was Lamanai, from lama’an ayin, ‘submerged crocodile’, a lagoon creature that features prominently in the site’s iconography.

Most of what we now know is the result of decades of work that David Pendergast of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto began in the 1970s; Hurricane Hattie in 1961 had flattened large areas of rainforest and rendered the site difficult of access for years. Instead of beginning at Lamanai, Pendergast undertook a productive programme of excavations at Altun Ha, which is about midway between Lamanai and the Caribbean shore. Although a small Maya centre, with only two plazas and lacking hieroglyphic monuments, its royal tombs yielded an inordinate amount of jade. Recent epigraphic work suggests that its political reach was surprisingly long but its relationship with Lamanai remains unknown. Lamanai looked an ever-more tempting target, and Pendergast finally began work there in 1974 (Pendergast Reference Pendergast1981).

Research and reconstruction (it is now a major tourist attraction and contributor to the Belizean economy) have continued for half a century, with the support of a wide range of scholars including Elizabeth Graham, Claude Belanger and Louise Belanger. The latter teamed up with Karen Pierce, author of an MA thesis on the Late Classic-into-Postclassic ceramics at Lamanai, to produce a corpus of scanned illustrations of the hundreds of complete and restorable pottery vessels that underpinned elucidation of the site’s history. Begun in 2020 as Covid-19 struck, it became what Pierce calls in her Prologue the Pandemic Pottery Project. This book is the invaluable result.

Pottery typology and stratigraphy are, for better or worse, the basis of Maya archaeological chronology. The nuances of ceramic development are more subtle than the broad bands of radiocarbon dating and tend to be consistent from site to site over large areas. The enormous database from Lamanai, comprising more than 800 vessels and other ceramic objects such as spindle whorls and figurines, is almost unmatched. The book’s title is accurate: it provides a catalogue raisonée of Maya ceramics from the mid-first millennium BC to the mid-second millennium AD, from the time when early farming villages in the tropical forest zone began to grow into garden cities ruled by divine kings, to the age of Spanish conquest and colonisation.

After a brief, informative introduction to the Lamanai site and details of how this study was conducted, excellent maps show where each sample was excavated. There are 132 pages of superb technical drawings (some 75% of them by Louise Belanger) and each vessel is annotated with its context, size and identification in the Type:variety+mode system used throughout Mesoamerican archaeology. For exegesis of this, one must refer to James Aimers’s Appendix A, best read immediately following the Introduction.

The order of illustrations looks initially odd, with vessels from the Preclassic, Classic and Postclassic periods mixed up on the same page; Pierce and Belanger decided to use the sequence of excavations, beginning with Pendergast’s first trenches and surface collection in 1974 and running through to an hiatus in 1986, before Elizabeth Graham took over as PI in 1998. The drawings are then complemented by a ‘Vessel and object information list’ in the same order, with columns giving (1) Type:variety designations (by Laura Kosakowsky and Robin Robertson for the Preclassic and James Aimers for the later periods); (2) the vessel form; (3) its context and date; (4) dimensions; and (5) any notes. The contents of burials and caches tend to be listed together, since excavated at the same time; the same goes for midden samples, such as the 16 Preclassic bowls from the P8-11 midden, where variability within the Sierra Red type can be judged, or the N10-18 midden of AD 800–1250 date, which has several unique and possibly imported vessels, as Aimers notes. Context allows striking pieces such as the effigy vessels LA774/1 (with its hunchback and inscribed body paint or tattoos) and the monkey pot LA774/17 from Tomb N12-26 to be firmly placed, which had they been looted and bought on the art market by an unscrupulous museum or collector would have remained a cultural conundrum.

What the book does not try to do is establish comparanda with other Maya site sequences. One wonders whether the Kan Cross motifs, noted but not illustrated, on the bottoms of Sierra Red bowls 355/8, 440/9 and 440/10 show contact with the site of K’axob downriver on the New River (McAnany Reference McAnany2004); and the bird-effigy vessel from Chultun P8-2, one of 21 pieces from this context assigned to AD 150–250, allows a chronological fine-tuning of the cache below the early Stela 1 at Cuello, also downriver (Hammond Reference Hammond1982). This splendid collocation of well-documented illustrations allows such questions to be asked and will be a source of enduring value to Maya studies.