Jay-yi Nah is an underwater archaeological web site relationship to the Early Conventional Maya interval (250-600 CE) that focused on salt manufacturing for native use or perhaps native manufacturing for down-the-line shopping for and promoting.
Incurved wall bowls from the sea-floor survey at Jay-yi Nah in Belize. Image credit score rating: H. McKillop.
The meals routine of the Maya civilization focused completely on corn, beans, squash and totally different salt-deficient plant meals, and explicit particular person diets have been supplemented with manufactured salt.
Fieldwork on the Paynes Creek Salt Works in southern Belize signifies that coastal Maya households produced surplus salt inside the Conventional interval (250-900 CE), establishing devoted salt kitchens and separate residences.
“Lots of the salt works alongside the coast of Belize date to the Late Conventional interval (650-800 CE), corresponding with a time of inhabitants growth inside the southern Maya lowlands,” said Louisiana State Faculty’s Professor Heather McKillop and Dr. Elizabeth Sills from the Faculty of Texas.
“These embrace salt works at Northern River Lagoon, Wits Cah Ak’al, Marco Gonzalez and totally different web sites on Ambergris Cay, Moho Cay, Colson Degree, Placencia Lagoon and the Paynes Creek Salt Works.”
“Large-scale salt manufacturing seems to have ended by the Terminal Conventional interval (800-900 CE), and perhaps earlier at Marco Gonzalez, when numerous the southern Maya lowlands was abandoned and there is a marked improve in circum-peninsular commerce, along with exotics wares resembling Very good Orange, Plumbate, Yucatan slate and totally different pottery evident from Marco Gonzalez and Wild Cane Cay particularly.”
In 2023, the archaeologists discovered a model new salt works web site, known as Jay-yi Nah, which curiously lacked the broken pots so widespread at totally different salt works, whereas numerous pottery sherds have been found.
“These resembled sherds from the shut by island web site of Wild Cane Cay, which I had beforehand excavated,” Professor McKillop said.
“So, I instructed to Dr. Sills that we survey Jay-yi Nah as soon as extra for posts and sea floor artifacts.”
The artifacts the researchers found contrasted with these from totally different shut by underwater web sites, which had imported pottery, obsidian, and high-quality chert, or flint.
“At first, this was perplexing. Nevertheless a radiocarbon date on a put up we’d found at Jay-yi Na provided an Early Conventional date, 250-600 CE, and solved the thriller,” Professor McKillop said.
Jay-yi Nah turned out to be quite a bit older than the alternative underwater web sites.
By way of their findings, the scientists found Jay-yi Nah had developed as an space enterprise, with out the pores and skin commerce connections that developed later in the middle of the Late Conventional interval, when the inland Maya inhabitants reached its peak with a extreme demand for salt — a elementary natural necessity briefly present inside the inland cities.
Jay-yi Nah had started as a small salt-making web site, with ties to the shut by neighborhood on Wild Cane Cay that moreover made salt in the middle of the Early Conventional interval.
Plentiful fish bones preserved in anaerobic deposits at Wild Cane Cay counsel some salt was made there for salting fish for later consumption or commerce.
“Distinctive huge bowls with incurved partitions and necked jars with grooved lips have been associated to an Early Conventional pole and thatch salt kitchen, nevertheless the vessel helps and commerce gadgets attribute of later salt work web sites have been absent,” the authors said.
“These artifactual variations allow for a consideration of technological changes in coastal salt manufacturing and the widening of commerce networks as inland demand for salt elevated inside the Late Conventional interval.”
“Whatever the challenges of archaeology in shallow underwater web sites, evaluation at Jay-yi Nah underscores the price of excavating in mangrove peat beneath the ocean floor the place preserved wooden construction precisely dates and affords context to historic practices of commodity manufacturing — on this case, salt.”
The findings appear inside the journal Antiquity.
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Heather McKillop & E. Cory Sills. Earliest Historic Maya salt manufacturing in southern Belize: excavations at Jay-yi Nah. Antiquityrevealed November 6, 2024; doi: 10.15184/aqy.2024.186