A bird’s-eye view of South America’s Yucatán Peninsula has revealed a 4,000-year-old giant fish in the vast inland region of Belize.
A long, winding network of canals and man-made ponds redevelops the wetland into what some researchers describe as a giant fish pond, covering 42 square kilometers (16 square miles) in extent.
Excavation has yielded several radiocarbon dates of the stoves, which indicate that they were used from about 2000 BCE to 200 CE.
Belize is home to the ancient Maya, but fishing was invented about 700 years before this civilization became popular in the area.
“The early days of the canals surprised us at first because we all assumed that these huge structures were built by the ancient Maya who lived in nearby cities,” says anthropologist Eleanor Harrison-Buck of the University of New Hampshire.
“However, after doing many radiocarbon dates, it became clear that they were built long ago.”
Harrison-Buck and his colleagues working on the Belize River East Archeology project argue these routes are part of the first major fishing grounds recorded in Central America.
They were probably built by Late Archaic hunter-gatherer-fishing groups, perhaps as a response to prolonged drought. Researchers estimate that the traps once caught enough fish to feed 15,000 people for an entire year.
If true, this supports the emerging evidence that the Mayan civilization was originally based on a feast of fish, not necessarily an abundance of corn, as some scientists have speculated.
“In Mesoamerica in general, we tend to see agriculture as the engine of development, but this study tells us that it wasn’t just agriculture – it was also an opportunity to harvest aquatic species,” explains Harrison-Buck.
Like other researchers working on Yucatán, Harrison-Buck’s team has recently begun using aerial surveys to look through dense vegetation or hard-to-reach areas. Their focus is on the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary (CTWS), which has hosted nearly 10,000 years of human habitation, as well as several other sites in the Maya Lowlands, including the New River, Rio Hondo, and Candelaria.
When the lakes in these wetlands dry up, the shores become marshy grassy areas, and the obscure earthen canals built in the clay-rich soil are “invisible”, researchers say. Some are only 20 centimeters (8 inches) deep.
With drone footage and Google Earth satellite images, however, the pattern is easily seen.
Satellite image of (A) modern fish in Zambia, Africa; (B) ancient fishing grounds in the Bolivian Amazon; and (C) ancient fishes in the Western Lagoon, CTWS, Belize (all images courtesy of Google Earth). (Harrison-Buck et al., Scientific Progress2024)
Previous studies have interpreted these channels as reservoirs or wetlands for agricultural wetlands. But scientists did not find pollen from corn plants, or any agricultural fields with ditches or ditches in these areas.
The water troughs are reminiscent of pre-Columbian fish traps built in the south, in the Bolivian Amazon.
Every year, during the wet season, floods fill the marshes and lakes of Belize, making the fish a good spawning ground. During the dry season, however, these man-made canals divert runoff into ponds, drawing aquatic life into the restricted area.
Even today, the residents of this area say that these lakes are still full of fish when the water is gone. Because the area is protected from harvesting, however, most of the fish are left to rot as the lakes slowly melt away.
Some scientists hypothesize that the abundance of food supplies first led hunter-gatherer societies to form settlements around valuable resources.
Drying, salting, and smoking the estimated millions of pounds of fish each year could easily have supported a large, permanent community in and around the CTWS, argue Harrison-Buck and others.
“Further investigations are needed to make this whole story clear,” they say.
The study was published in Advances in Science.