Mason Rio Frio Caves Artifact Assemblage.

in 1928, the Museum of the American Indian (MAI)-Heye Foundation in NY commissioned Gregory Mason to travel to Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize (then British Honduas) to collect ethnographic object to add to its collection. On the trip, he learned of a cave from a Mr. Albert August who told him that it “opens from a slit in the side of the hill, and has many, many rooms filled with pots– pots everywhere” (Mason 1940). Given the purpose of his trip, Mason decided to make excavations there, and wound up locating two other caves, naming them Rio Frio Cave A,B, and C. Today Caves A and B are known as Twin Cave, and Cave C is Rio Frio Cave. From them, Mason collected over 700 artifacts, mostly ceramics. Coming to an agreement with the colonial authorities after the fact, Mason was permitted to ship the entire assemblage back to NY with the understanding that a preselected half would be shipped to the British Museum half a year later, and the Heye Foundation could keep the remaining portion for their collections. After taking basic measurements of just the whole and partial vessels in Belize, Mason shipped the assemblage back to NY. There, MAI staff prepared the collection, refitting and reconstructing the artifacts. Mason published a short monograph on the caves and its artifacts in the Heye Foundation’s Indian Notes and Monograph Series. Titled, “Pottery and Other Artifacts from Caves in British Honduras and Guatemala.” Though he mentions a cave in Guatemala and another in Belize near the border, the small book focuses on the the Rio Frio Caves and Mason’s trip there but it reads more of an adventure journal than it does a proper archaeological report. Illustrated with 30 photographs reproduced in varying qualities, the disorganized discussion provides some measurements and descriptions of only the whole and partial vessels and the non-ceramic artifacts. In the text, the locations of some of the described artifacts is given, but the provenience for most of it was never recorded. In the 1980s, the MAI was absorbed into the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and the collection moved to it’s curation facility, the Cultural Resource Center (CRC) in Suitland, Maryland. Over two trips to the CRC 2023, RiFRAP’s director began documenting the collection photographing, measuring, and making technical drawings and type-variety-mode assessments of all of the artifacts. The work is ongoing, and this page under construction, but this page is intended to present this collection in its entirety to the public for the first time. We welcome you now to explore this collection below.

Pictures have been captioned with their accession number 1618XX.YYY and an three digit artifact number assigned during Dr. Spenard’s study. Artifact numbers were assigned starting with 001 for each accession number. For example, 1618434.000.005 would be the fifth artifact recorded during the study from accession number 161834.000.