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Friday, July 08, 2005
Underwater Archaeology in Belize
Channel 5 in Belize has a story about the Archaeology Symposium going on there and the discovery last year of a wooden paddle in a peat bog in the Toledo District of the country. Makes me want to go back so bad:(
Dr. Heather McKillop, an archaeologist based at Louisiana State University, and a team of graduate students made the find in the Punta Ycacos Lagoon in 2004 while searching underwater for evidence of how the ancient Maya produced and distributed bulk products to its cities inland. One such everyday item was salt.
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Intensive tests on the paddle and posts have since determined the artefacts date back to the late Classic Maya, AD 680-880. But more significantly, the discoveries have led experts to theorize that the more than forty sites in Punta Ycacos are the remains of the infrastructure of a large factory, with a production line of standardized pots, hundreds of workers, and a number of buildings.
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Archaeologists are now desperately searching for the canoe that was used to paddle up the various rivers to deliver the precious salt. According to Director of the Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, the unique find in Meso-America is just one of the more than thirty presentations made in the third annual Belize Archaeology Symposium.
(Thanks to ArchaeoBlog)
Posted by Will at July 8, 2005 11:34 PM in Maya Archaeology