Salt -- An Important Food Mineral

A beautiful shot of salt from the USGS by Scott Horvath.

Known to mineralogists as halite and to chemists as sodium chloride, salt is a mineral people need to live -- for both breathing and being able to digest what you eat. For the ancient Maya, who may have needed up to 30 grams of salt a day, salt was part of their diet and also had religious meaning. (The Maya today still make salt today.)

How The Maya Made Salt
The ancient Maya were known to use two methods for getting salt, both of which took a lot of work. One way they got salt was to boil salt water in ceramic vessels until the water was gone. (Archaeologists have found one technique for heating the water in these vessels was to put them on top of ceramic cylinders that were set upright around a fire. So far, it looks like the Maya in both southern Belize as well as the Pacific coast used this technique.) The Maya who made salt this way had to make sure they got enough wood to keep the fire going.

The other way was rake up salt made by the sun drying salt water in estuaries.  (Estuaries are places on coasts where seawater mixes with freshwater trying to go into the saltwater -- like a river.)

What the ancient Maya who lived in the north of the Yucatan Peninsula did. When compared with the boiling method, it was easier for two reasons. One was because the northern part of the peninsula is semi-arid, which means that the climate is drier. The other reason was because the northern Yucatan Peninsula has estuaries that are very salt-filled.Of the two ways the Maya made salt, this way was easier.

Salt Sources
So far as it can be seen, it's thought that the ancient Maya's biggest source for salt was seawater. Other sources of salt they may have had are certain palm leaves, burned for edible ash, and salt springs. (The ancient Maya also had a source of salt in the form of animal meat.)

Uses for Salt
The Maya may have used salt as a preservative as well as an ingredient in cooking, and they used as part of their religious practices. (On a related note, the market murals at Calakmul show a person selling salt -- the caption for this person was aj atz'aam. This has been translated as "he/she of salt" or "salt person." The seller is selling salt from a basket, and has a spoon for scooping.)

Consideration: Saltworks of Note
One notable saltwork was Celestún, located in the Yucatan Peninsula -- it was the second largest salt works in all of Mesoamerica. Another very striking saltwork in the northern Yucatan Peninsula was Las Coloradas. This saltwork provided salt that was pink. It was pink because of beta-carotene rich invertebrate sea creatures.

Another notable saltworks was the Paynes Creek Salt Work, which is located in Belize. At Paynes Creek, archaeologists have found remains of what they understand are wooden buildings -- inside which the ancient Maya there made salt.

A significant area of salt works was Punta Ycacos Lagoon. This lagoon had a total of 41 salt works during the Late Classic. Most of this salt was going to be traded with the ancient Maya in the Peten region of Guatemala.

Significance
The number of  people in the Maya area became larger and larger during the Classic Period. Because of this, salt's value kept increasing. This was really good for business for salt makers in the south of Belize, because they became richer and also were able to stay separate from city-states/polities that were farther away from the ocean. (The Maya in south Belize also traded other ocean-sourced products.)

There's a view that the Yucatan Peninsula's salt, which was white, was a luxury item.


References:
Google Books: "Ancient Maya Commerce: Multidisciplinary Research at Chunchucmil"; Scott R. Hutson (editor); 2017

Google Books: "The Value of Things: Prehistoric to Contemporary Commodities in the Maya Region"; Jennifer P Mathews, Thomas H. Guderjan; 2017

Louisiana State University: LSU Digital Commons: LSU Doctoral Dissertations: "Excavations and Interpretation of Two Ancient Maya Salt-Work Mounds, Paynes Creek National Park, Toledo District, Belize"; Rachel Mariah Watson; 2015

Google Books: "Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands: Gender, Age, Memory, and Place"; Traci Ardren; 2015

Louisiana State University: Department of Geography and Anthropology: "Fuelling the Ancient Maya Salt Industry"; Mark Robinson, Heather McKillop; 2014

Mesoweb: Maya Archaeology Reports: "Maya Archaeology 2": "The Murals of Chiik Nahb Structure Sub 1-4, Calakmul, Mexico"; Ramón Carrasco Vargas María Cordeiro Baqueiro; 2012

Google Books: "La Cocina Mexicana"; Marilyn Tausend, Ricardo Muñoz Zurita; 2012

Google Books: "Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica"; John Edward Staller, Michael Carrasco (editors); 2010

PNAS: "Finds in Belize Document Late Classic Maya Salt Making and Canoe Transport"; Healther McKillop; 12 April 2005

National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis: Kids Do Ecology: World Biomes: Estuaries

Image Credits
USGS: "Salt, Sodium, Chlorine"; Scott Horvath; c. 2017