Heather McKillop and her team at Louisiana State University have discovered new information about the organization of the salt industry during the Classic Maya civilization. Credit: LSU
The ancient Maya had stone temples and palaces in the rainforest of Central America, but they lacked a basic commodity essential to daily life: salt. Salt is mainly found along the coast, including salt flats on the Yucatan coast and brine-boiling along the coast of Belize, where it rains a lot. How did the Maya keep a supply of salt?
Heather McKillop and her team from LSU Maya have excavated salt kitchens where brine was boiled in clay pots over fires in pole and thatch buildings that were preserved in oxygen-free sediment below the sea floor. The location of the salt workers has been hard to find, leaving interpretations of daily or seasonal workers from the coast or inland. There were questions about the organization of production and distribution.
The organization of the salt industry to supply the inland cities during the Classic Maya civilization has been reported in a recent article by LSU alumni and University Texas-Tyler associate professor, Cory Sills. The article "Briquetage and brine: Living and Working at the Ek Way Nal Salt Works, Belize" was published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica.
The National Science Foundation funded the project to understand the energetics of production of salt and the residences where the salt workers lived. The Paynes Creek Saltworks has been put on hold since March 2020 due to the Pandemic, but the researchers are still looking at material previously exported for study in the LSU Archeology lab.
The Archeology lab at LSU has hundreds of plastic containers of water, but they are keeping the wood samples wet so they don't dry out and degrade.
The Maya Paynes Creek salt works site in Belize has been submerged underwater and preserved. Heather McKillop is from LSU.
She explained that she wanted to see if the buildings at Ek Way Nal were the same age as the artifacts on the sea floor, so she submitted a wood post sample for radiocarbon dating.
When the dates started coming in, two at a time, McKillop identified a building construction sequence that began in the Late Classic at the height of Maya civilization and continued through the Terminal Classic when the leaders of inland city states lost control and eventually the cities were abandoned by A.
The model for developing archeological expectations for different activities for brine boiling in a salt kitchen, a residence and other activities, including salting fish, was used by the well-studied site of Sacapulas, Guatemala.
In the Ancient Mesoamerica article, they report a 3-part building construction sequence with salt kitchens, at least one residence and an outdoor area where fish were salted and dried. The archeologists used a strategy of radiocarbon dating to create a fine grain chronology for Ek Way Nal.
The new analysis shows that 10 salt kitchens were in production at the Paynes Creek Salt Works at the same time.
The research shows the importance of radiocarbon dating the pole and thatch at the salt works in order to evaluate production capacity. The value of individually mapping artifacts and posts on the sea floor at the underwater sites is shown in the research. The Maya living permanently at the community were engaged in surplus household production of salt that was well integrated in the regional economy, allowing them to acquire a variety of nonlocal goods.
Heather McKillop and her colleagues wrote about living and working at the classic Maya Salt Works of Ek Way NAL, BELIZE. There is a DOI for 10.1017/S0956121000341.
Archeologists discovered salt workers' residences at underwater Maya site in November of 2021.
The document is copyrighted. Any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research cannot be reproduced without written permission. The content is not intended to be used for anything other than information purposes.
