BATON ROUGE – LSU Doris Stone Professor of Latin American Studies Heather McKillop, Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences Boyd Professor Harry Roberts and adjunct Karen McKee, together with colleagues from Auburn University-Montgomery, have received collaborative linked National Science Foundation, or NSF, grants to study the salt industry of the ancient Maya.
The researchers will be investigating a massive salt industry in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize, including its submergence by sea-level rise and the wooden structures preserved in a peat bog below the seafloor. Despite complaints of too much salt in many modern Western diets, salt is a basic biological necessity for human life. In antiquity, hunting and gathering societies generally obtained enough salt from wild animal meat and plants. Access to salt – from mining, solar evaporation and brine boiling – appears with the rise of agriculture, permanent villages and dense populations of cities. Some ancient states controlled the production and distribution of salt by assigning administrators at salt works, or by levying a salt tax. Salt was in short supply in the interior of the Yucatan peninsula in Central America, where the ancient Maya civilization developed (A.D. 300-900). The salt works in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize, may provide a possible solution to inland salt needs during the Classic Maya civilization.
Could enough salt have been produced at the Paynes Creek sites and elsewhere along the coast of Belize to supply nearby inland Maya cities? The scientists will be looking for evidence of how the ancient Maya at inland cities obtained a regular supply of salt: was it by direct state administered trade or more indirectly through tribute, taxation or trading alliances with the coastal Maya? The stunning preservation of wooden architecture at the Paynes Creek salt works was due to peat created as Rhizophora mangle, or red mangroves, kept pace with rising seas, which eventually drowned the Paynes Creek salt works – a sobering reminder for low-lying coastal areas world-wide.
The project, titled "Ancient Maya Wooden Architecture and the Salt Industry," was awarded to McKillop, LSU Department of Geography and Anthropology; Roberts, LSU Coastal Studies and Department of Oceanography and Coastal Studies; and McKee, United States Geological Survey Wetlands Research National Center in Lafayette, La., and LSU Geography and Anthropology adjunct faculty. It is linked to an award to Terance Winemiller of Auburn University-Montgomery. Winemiller earned his Ph.D. in geography from LSU.
McKillop will direct underwater excavations of the Paynes Creek salt works, which have wooden buildings preserved in a peat bog below the sea floor, as well as "briquetage" – pottery from boiling brine to produce salt. Roberts will lead a team using remote sensing in an automated vessel designed for shallow water to record bathymetry and search for buried remains. Winemiller will work with Roberts' team to integrate the imagery into the project GIS and also to expand the display of wooden architecture to three-dimensional views. McKee will direct a systematic program of sediment coring across the lagoon system. Analysis of the sediment will help to reconstruct the ancient landscape during the Holocene, with emphasis on the land, vegetation patterns and sea-level changes related to the ancient Maya sites.
Other researchers involved in the project include Michael Wiemann of the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Products Lab in Madison, Wis. and another LSU alumnus, will be directing species identification of waterlogged wood; John Jones of Washington State University will be identifying pollen; and C. Wayne Smith of Texas A&M and LSU Geography and Anthropology adjunct faculty will direct conservation of waterlogged wood and other materials.
The project includes LSU students Jessica Harrison, Jaclyn Landry and Taylor Aucoin; Anthropology graduate student Roberto Rosado; and Ph.D. candidates Cory Sills and Mark Robinson.
The wooden structures, along with the first reported ancient Maya wooden canoe paddle from the K'ak' Naab' underwater site, were discovered in 2004 with support from a faculty research grant at LSU. With a previous NSF grant, McKillop and team of LSU students, mapped 4,000 wooden posts defining rectangular buildings, as well as other structures that may have been platforms to leach salt soil before the boiling process. Since stone buildings and the mounded remains of perishable structures dominate the modern landscape of Maya sites, the Paynes Creek wooden structures provide a key to documenting ancient wooden buildings, to evaluating analogies with modern structures and for providing analogues for other ancient sites.
Contact Ashley Berthelot
LSU Media Relations
225-578-3870
aberth4@lsu.edu
n:October2010/mckillopsalt.ab
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