Wall painting shows the oldest known record of selling salt at a market in the Mayan region

The first documented record of salt as an ancient Mayan commodity in a market is depicted in a mural painted more than 2,500 years ago at Calakmul, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. In the mural depicting everyday life, a salt vendor shows what appears to be a salt cake wrapped in leaves to another person, who is holding a large spoon over a basket, presumably of loose salt and granular. This is the first known record of selling salt at a market in the Mayan region. Salt is a basic biological necessity and is also useful for preserving food. Salt was also popular in the Mayan region because of its restricted distribution.

The salt cakes could have been easily transported in canoes along the coast and rivers of southern Belize, writes LSU archaeologist Heather McKillop in a new article published in the Anthropological Archeology Journal. She discovered in 2004 the first remains of ancient Mayan salt kitchen buildings made of pole and thatch that had been submerged and preserved in a saltwater lagoon in a mangrove forest in Belize. Since then, she and her team of graduate and undergraduate students at LSU and their colleagues have mapped 70 sites that include a vast array of rooms and buildings at Paynes Creek Salt Works.

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

His research team found at Paynes Creek Saltworks, 4,042 submerged wooden architectural poles, a canoe, an oar, a high-quality jadeite tool, stone tools used to salt fish and meat, and hundreds of pottery. .

“I think the ancient Mayans who worked here were producer-sellers and they transported salt by canoe down the river. They were making large amounts of salt, far more than they needed for their immediate families. It was their life, ”said McKillop, who is Professor Thomas & Lillian Landrum Alumni in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at LSU.

She has investigated hundreds of pieces of pottery, including 449 rims of ceramic vessels used to make salt. Two of his graduate students were able to reproduce the pottery on a 3D printer in the Digital Imaging Visualization Lab in the McKillop Archeology Lab at LSU based on scans taken in Belize at the study site. She found that ceramic pots used to boil brine were standardized in volume; thus, salt producers produced standardized units of salt.

“Produced as homogeneous units, salt may have been used as a bargaining chip,” McKillop said.

An ethnographic interview with a modern-day salt producer in Sacapulas, Guatemala, collected in 1981, confirms the idea that the ancient Mayans could also view salt as a valuable commodity:

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