Submerged City in Belize Reveals the Maya's Secret Trade Advantage: Salt
Traders extraordinaire
Hola Amigos! The Maya civilization never fails to amaze me as I discover their advancements in diverse spheres. I knew they were traders extraordinaire, but I had no idea that a commodity we take for granted, salt, had been instrumental to their success. Read on, please.
Known in the ancient world as astute astronomers, temple builders, and lords of the jungle, the Maya captured our imagination by their ability to read the night sky and to build magnificent stepped pyramids.
Often left out of the Maya's intricate narrative is their competence at having developed extensive trade networks that linked present day Guatemala, Honduras, and the Yucatán to the Caribbean coast.
Traders extraordinaire
Using large seagoing canoes, Maya traders plied the Caribbean coast from Mexico to Panama, bringing obsidian, jade, feathers, pelts, and numerous other goods from the interior and highlands of their vast empire to far flung regions. But little has been mentioned until lately of their most highly valued commodity—salt.1
The Yucatán Peninsula has salt fields in Rio Lagartos, made famous by the annual migration of the flamingos that return to feast on the pink brine shrimp that give them color. The flats are large bodies of water where natural condensation has removed the water from the mineral so that salt can be harvested.
Salt brine
But salt from salt fields was not the only type of salt the Maya traded. During the peak of the Classic Era, from 300 to 900 CE, coastal Maya also produced salt by boiling brine in pots over fires. The end result was shaped into salt cakes, then paddled by canoe to coastal cities to be traded extensively at markets throughout MesoAmerica.
Salt is essential for life and as ancient civilizations evolved from hunters and gatherers into agrarian societies, it was not immediately clear how this mineral was acquired until Heather McKillop, an archeologist at Louisiana State University along with her co-author anthropologist Kazuo Aoyama from Japan's Ibaraki University, an expert on stone tools, produced evidence in research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Thirty year study
McKillop has been studying salt production sites in Belize's Maya lowlands for 30 years. After discovering a number of submerged Maya cities through underwater excavations, research revealed how the Maya manufactured salt. 2The discovery comes from a now submerged archeological site known as Ta'ab Nuk Na. It was inhabited from 600 to 800 CE in an area Belizians call Paynes Creek.
Ta'ab Nuk Na is the largest known Maya saltworks in the country and the most revelatory. Her team has uncovered the remains of 110 salt-producing kitchens in the region, each one capable of producing enough salt for 7,000 people per day. 3
Sharing her co-author and stone expert Kazuo Aoyama's input, McKillop said in Science Daily, "I thought the findings would be that they cut a lot of wood, but in fact, the majority of the stone tools were used for cutting meat and fish. That really changed our views."
Salt and the Maya economy
She and Aoyama realized not only were the Maya producing a lot of salt, they were also using salt to produce necessary food commodities for export. This meant the salt-producing Maya played an important role in the greater Maya civilization, which at its height, was believed to have encompassed millions of people throughout MesoAmerica.
"Our research is clear that the coastal Maya were an integral part of the Maya economy because they produced and traded a basic commodity, salt. Since everybody needed salt, the coastal Maya really contributed to daily life," said McKillop.
Preserved by mangroves
Although water erodes century-old wooden structures, the Belize site is embedded in anaerobic mangrove peat which contains very low oxygen and staves off micro-organisms that would typically break down similar structures.
The survey revealed the presence of ancient salt works, called kitchens, for brine broiling. The salty sea water would be placed in ceramic vessels and heated on a fire. The water would evaporate off, leaving behind just the salt. This valuable mineral was stored in the vessels and traded. New analyses of stone tools found at the Paynes Creek Salt Works site—as it is being called—reveal that not only were the Maya making salt in large quantities but were also salting fish and meat to meet dietary needs while producing a commodity that could be stored and traded.
Salt kitchen workers
Not much is known about the salt workers and their lives. Though they may have been seasonal or daily workers, finding a residence at Ta'ab Nuk Na led researches to believe this was also their home. But lack of verifiable information leaves a gap in drawing the complete picture of salt sale production and distribution.
Excavations revealed the remains of several buildings dating to the 6th century—ten pole and hatch huts were discovered. Marking individual artifacts on the sea floor allowed the team to see their distribution and reconstruct the activities in the different buildings, McKillop said.
Multi-faceted
Not only did the Maya "work from home" by producing salt in their backyards, they also performed household activities such as fishing, preparing and cooking food, woodworking, and spinning cotton. Researchers say the household would have produced salt for itself before trading the surplus with other communities.
Salt was a scarce commodity inland, where Maya cities were experiencing growth. Most of those areas were supplied from salt works that were located along the coast. In total, the sites at Ta'ab Nuk Na and elsewhere in the lagoon could have produced 60 tons of salt over the course of the four-month dry season, based on the production of a modern salt works in Guatemala. Along with being an invaluable tool for preserving food, salt was also used as currency in the Maya economy.
Cottage industry
"You might expect this high demand to require a huge organized industry but it appears the civilization's huge salt output was mainly built upon this kind of cottage industry," McKillop said in the Science Daily article.
McKillop's study is a three-square mile area surrounded by mangrove forest that had been buried beneath a saltwater lagoon due to sea level rise.
"Sea level rise completely submerged these sites underwater," she said.
Watery fate
It's not yet clear exactly when the Belize cities met their underwater fate. But McKillop's research is ongoing and she's positive she and her team will get to the bottom of the salt question and through technology, identify dates that the sea might have taken over. And maybe now that archeologists are aware of underwater cities that were vital parts of the Maya empire, more underwater excavations will occur. Stay tuned.
Please remember to hit the heart button to like it.
MY BACKSTORY—Puerto Morelos sits 100 miles from four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. Living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland made it easy to pyramid hop on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids and the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’m still enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here on Mexico Soul.
Conny Waters. “Salt Workers’ Residences at Underwater Maya Site – Identified.” Archeology News. November 22, 2021.
Heather I. McKillop. “Flooded mangrove landscapes hide ancient Maya coastal sites in Belize.” Journal of Island and Coastal Archeology. Vol. 19, 2024.
Editor. “1500-Year-Old Salt Works Submerged in Belize Lagoon Reveals Rare Mayan Architevure.” MyBelize.Net. October 19, 2022.
Thanks for the restack @Bernardette Hernández
I wrote hundreds of blogs for Invisa Hotels about Ibiza and mentioned the history of the salt flats, fascinating how much this would have boosted economies at one point! Thank you for unearthing this for us, keeping our brains learning and our eyes open.