A group of archaeologists from LSU and the College of Texas at Tyler have excavated the earliest recognized historic Maya salt works in southern Belize, as reported within the journal Antiquity. The group was led by LSU Alumni Professor Heather McKillop, who first found wood buildings preserved there beneath the ocean flooring, together with related artifacts, and the one historic Maya wood canoe paddle in 2004.
Her key collaborator, Assistant Professor Elizabeth Sills on the College of Texas at Tyler, started working with McKillop as a grasp’s pupil after which as a doctoral pupil at LSU.
Since their preliminary discovery of wooden beneath the ocean flooring in Belize, the group has uncovered an in depth sample of web sites that embody “salt kitchens” for boiling seawater in pots over a hearth to make salt, residences for salt employees, and the stays of different pole and thatch buildings.
All have been remarkably properly preserved in purple mangrove peat in shallow coastal lagoons. Since 2004, the LSU analysis group has mapped as many as 70 underwater websites, with 4,042 wood posts marking the outlines of historic buildings.
In 2023, the group returned to Belize to excavate a web site known as Jay-yi Nah, which curiously lacked the damaged pots so widespread at different salt works, whereas just a few pottery sherds have been discovered.
“These resembled sherds from the close by island web site of Wild Cane Cay, which I had beforehand excavated,” McKillop mentioned. “So, I steered to Sills that we survey Jay-yi Nah once more for posts and sea flooring artifacts.”
After their excavations, McKillop stayed in a close-by city to check the artifacts from Jay-yi Nah. As reported in Antiquity, the supplies they discovered contrasted with these from different close by underwater websites, which had imported pottery, obsidian, and high-quality chert, or flint.
“At first, this was perplexing,” McKillop mentioned. “However a radiocarbon date on a submit we would discovered at Jay-yi Na offered an Early Traditional date, 250-600 AD, and solved the thriller.”
Jay-yi Nah turned out to be a lot older than the opposite underwater websites. By means of their findings, the researchers realized Jay-yi Nah had developed as a neighborhood enterprise, with out the surface commerce connections that developed later in the course of the Late Traditional interval (AD 650-800), when the inland Maya inhabitants reached its peak with a excessive demand for salt — a primary organic necessity briefly provide within the inland cities.
Jay-yi Nah had began as a small salt-making web site, with ties to the close by group on Wild Cane Cay that additionally made salt in the course of the Early Traditional interval. Plentiful fish bones preserved in anaerobic deposits at Wild Cane Cay counsel some salt was made there for salting fish for later consumption or commerce.