Underwater archaeologists studying ancient Maya salt production along the coast of Belize have found that ordinary families, not large centralized workshops, ran the region’s salt-making operations.
The findings, published in the journal Latin American Antiquity, focus on the Paynes Creek Salt Works, a network of submerged sites where the Maya boiled seawater into salt more than a thousand years ago.
The study was led by Heather McKillop of Louisiana State University and E. Cory Sills of the University of Texas at Tyler. Over four field seasons, the researchers excavated and mapped underwater Maya salt sites in Belize, focusing on three locations: Ta’ab Nuk Na, Ek Way Nal and Jay-yi Na.
The wooden buildings where salt was once made now lie beneath the water because of sea-level rise, which preserved them for archaeologists to study centuries later.
Underwater excavations reveal how Maya salt workers lived in Belize
At Ta’ab Nuk Na and Ek Way Nal, researchers found both salt kitchens and residences standing close together. The salt kitchens were filled with broken salt pottery, called “briquetage,” while the residences contained a broader mix of tools and vessels typical of everyday Maya households.
McKillop and Sills said this pairing shows that the people who made the salt also lived at the work sites full time, running the operation as a family business rather than as laborers controlled by a distant city.
To make the salt, workers boiled brine in clay pots over slow fires set inside the buildings. Once the salt hardened into cakes, workers broke the pots apart to remove it, which explains why so much shattered pottery covers the sites today.
The researchers noted that this method closely resembles salt-making practices recorded among modern communities in Sacapulas, Guatemala.
Jay-yi Na’s older technology points to Maya salt-making innovation
Jay-yi Na stood apart from the other sites. Excavations there turned up large, open bowls and no imported trade goods, and the site dates earlier, to the Early Classic period.
The findings suggest salt-making technology changed over time, eventually giving way to clay ovens that trapped heat and burned less fuel than the earlier method of suspending pots above open flames.
The study found no evidence of overseers or elite control at the salt works, pointing instead to independent production run by local families. Workers likely paddled finished salt inland by canoe, trading it for food and other goods with communities that had little access to salt of their own.
The findings add to a broader understanding of how everyday households, not only elite-run workshops, helped power trade networks across the ancient Maya world.
See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.com. Contact our newsroom to report an update or send your story, photos and videos. Follow GR on Google News and subscribe here to our daily email!
