The ancient Maya had stone temples and palaces in the Central American rainforest, along with dynastic records of royal leaders carved in stone, but they lacked an essential staple for daily life:salt.
Sources of salt are found primarily along the coast, including salt flats on the Yucatan coast and brining along the coast of Belize, where it rains a lot. But how did the inland Maya maintain their salt supply?
Louisiana State University archaeologist Heather McKillop and her team have excavated ovens where salt was boiled in clay pots over fires in stick-and-straw buildings preserved in oxygen-depleted sediment beneath the Belizean seafloor. But where these salt workers lived has been elusive, leaving possible interpretations of daily or seasonal workers from the coast or even inland. This gap left doubts about the organization of production and distribution.
In a recent article by McKillop and Cory Sills, an associate professor at the University of Texas-Tyler, new findings are collected on the organization of the salt industry to supply this staple food product to inland cities during the Classic Maya civilization. . The article Briquetage and brine:Living and Working at the Ek Way Nal Salt Works, Belize was published in the journal Ancient Mesoamerica .
McKillop and Sills initiated this new project to find the residences in which salt workers lived and to understand the energetics of salt production, with funding from the National Science Foundation .
Although fieldwork at Ek Way Nal, where the Paynes Creek Salt Flat is located, has been postponed since March 2020 due to the pandemic, researchers turned to previously exported material for study at the LSU Archeology lab ( Louisiana State University), including hundreds of samples of wood from post and straw buildings, as well as ceramic pieces.
McKillop explained the strategy for continuing the research in the lab:I decided to send a wooden post sample for radiocarbon dating from each building on Ek Way Nal to see if they all dated to the same time, which suggested the visibility of artifacts and buildings at the bottom of the sea .
As the dates began to trickle in, two by two, McKillop identified a sequence of building construction that began in the Late Classic, at the height of the Maya civilization, and continued into the Terminal Classic, when the dynastic leaders of the cities- state of the interior lost control and finally the cities were abandoned around 900 A.D.
According to McKillop, using the well-studied site, Sacapulas, Guatemala, as a model, worked well to develop archaeological expectations for different activities to boil brine in a salt oven, a residence, and other activities, including salting fish .
In the Ancient Mesoamerica article , report a sequence of building construction in three parts with salt ovens, at least one residence and an outdoor area where fish was salted and dried. The archaeologists' strategy of radiocarbon dating each building had produced a more specific chronology for Ek Way Nal which they are using for more sites.
The new analysis verifies McKillop's estimate that there were 10 salt kilns in production at one time at the Paynes Creek Salt Flats, which he reported in his book Maya Salt Works (2019, University Press of Florida).
“The research underscores the importance of radiocarbon dating each post and straw building in the salt flats to assess the production capacity of this dietary necessity. The research also shows the value of individually mapping artifacts and seafloor poles at underwater sites to interpret building use. Using the Sacapulas salt flats as a model from which to develop archaeological correlations fits with Ek Way Nal and suggests that the Maya who lived permanently in the community engaged in surplus domestic production of salt that was well integrated into the regional economy, thus allowed them to purchase a variety of non-local goods ”.