Mural shows the earliest known record of salt sold at a market in the Maya region

The first documented record of salt as an ancient Mayan commodity on a market is depicted in a mural painted more than 2,500 years ago on Calakmul, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. In the mural depicting daily life, a salt seller shows a salt cake wrapped in leaves to another person holding a large spoon over a basket, presumably of loose, granular salt. It is the earliest known record of salt sold at a market in the Maya region. Salt is a basic biological necessity and is also useful for preserving food. Salt has also been valued in the Mayan area due to its limited distribution.

Salt cakes could easily be transported in canoes along the coast and rivers in southern Belize, writes LSU archaeologist Heather McKillop in a new article published in the Journal of Anthropological Archeology. In 2004, she discovered the first remnants of ancient Mayan pole and grass kitchen kitchens submerged and preserved in a saltwater lagoon in a mangrove forest in Belize. Since then, she and her team of graduate and undergraduate students and colleagues have mapped 70 sites that include an extensive network of rooms and buildings from the Paynes Creek Salt Works.

“It’s like a blueprint for what’s happened in the past,” McKillop said. “They boil brine in pots over fires to make salt.”

Her research team discovered at the Paynes Creek Salt Works 4042 submerged architectural wooden posts, a canoe, a paddle, a high-quality jadeite tool, stone tools used to salt fish and meat, and hundreds of pieces of pottery.

“I think the ancient Mayans who worked here were producer-sellers and they would take the salt by canoe up the river. They made large quantities of salt, much more than they needed for their immediate families. It was theirs. livelihood, “he said. McKillop, who is the Thomas & Lillian Landrum Professor in the LSU Department of Geography and Anthropology.

She examined hundreds of pieces of pottery, including 449 fields of ceramic barrels used to make salt. Two of her graduate students were able to replicate the pottery on a 3D printer in McLillop’s Digital Imaging Visualization in Archeology lab at LSU, based on scans taken at the campus in Belize. She discovered that the ceramic pots with which the brine was cooked were standardized in volume; the salt producers therefore made standardized units of salt.

“Produced as homogeneous units, salt can be used as money in return,” McKillop said.

An ethnographic interview with a contemporary salt producer in Sacapulas, Guatemala, collected in 1981, supports the idea that ancient Mayan salt may also have been considered a valuable commodity:

“The kitchen is a bank with money for us … If we need money at any time during the year, we come to the kitchen and earn money, salt.”