BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA—According to a statement released by Louisiana State University (LSU), an early Maya saltworks has been identified in southern Belize by archaeologists Heather McKillop of LSU and Elizabeth Sills of the University of Texas at Tyler. The two have discovered multiple Maya saltworks sites in red mangrove peat in Belize’s shallow coastal lagoons since 2004. This site, however, lacked artifacts typically found at the other saltworks, such as imported pottery, obsidian, and high-quality chert. “At first, this was perplexing,” McKillop said. “But a radiocarbon date on a [wooden] post we’d found [underwater] at Jay-yi Nah provided an Early Classic date, A.D. 250 to 600, and solved the mystery,” she explained. This early saltworks developed without the trade connections to inland Maya populations detected at the other Late Classic period (A.D. 650–800) saltworks. Rather, the researchers said, Jay-yi Nah had ties to nearby Wild Cane Cay. Preserved fish bones unearthed on the island suggest the salt was used to preserve fish for later local use or even for trading purposes. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Antiquity. For more on Maya production of and trade in sea salt, go to "Around the World: Belize."
