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You just never know what you are going to find when visiting a thrift shop.
Anna Lee Dozier of Washington, DC was shopping at the 2A Thrift Store in Clinton, Maryland about five years ago when she ran across a little vase that she thought was a pretty good deal.
It was only $3.99 and it looked like a good reproduction of a Mayan vase.
“It looked old-ish, but I thought maybe 20, 30 years old and some kind of tourist reproduction thing so I brought it home,” Dozier told WUSA News.
Nice, right? End of story? Not even close.
This past January, Dozier was on a work trip in Mexico when she decided to visit the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
As she was viewing some of the items on display she realized that they looked a lot like her reproduced vase.
“So, I just asked what would be process if I had something that was old and I wanted to repatriate it, how would I go about that?” said Dozier, adding, “She was a bit skeptical, but said you would go back to your country and contact the embassy.”
So, when she got back home, that’s exactly what she did.
After sending the embassy pictures and the dimensions of her vase, they replied back that it wasn’t a reproduction at all. It was a ceremonial urn that belonged to the Indigenous Mayan people and dates back to between 200 and 800 AD – nearly two thousand years ago.
“I am thrilled to have played a part in it’s repatriation story,” she said. “I would like it to go back to its rightful place and to where it belongs, but I also want it out of my home because I have three little boys and I have been petrified. Well, it’s gone now, but I was petrified that after two thousand years I would be the one to wreck it!”
She and her boys even got to meet Mexican Ambassador Estaban Moctezuma Barragan at the Cultural Institute of Mexico when she returned the vase.
This is the second time in the past year that a vase bought for $3.99 at a thrift shop in the region around Washington DC has turned out to be way more than the buyer thought it was.
Last year, a woman named Jessica Vincent purchased a vase at a Goodwill in Richmond, Virginia for $3.99 and six months later sold the Carlo Scarpa vase (“one of the rarest works of Italian Glass”) at auction for $107,000.