Ancient Maya Traders of Ambergris Caye

Ambergris Caye

Ambergris Caye S ince the mid-1980s, two groups have been investigating the archaeology of Ambergris Caye. Elizabeth Graham and David Pendergast of the Royal Ontario Museum have worked at the site of Marco Gonzalez on the southern end of the island. The Ambergris Caye Archaeological Project, directed by Tom Guderjan of the University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio, James Garber and David Glassman of Southwest Texas State University , and Herman Smith of the Corpus Christi Museum, spent four years finding and excavating ruins on the northern end. Together, we have been able to learn much of the Maya past at Ambergris. When the Ambergris Caye Project started, our interest was in learning about the maritime trade of the Maya which must have occurred on Ambergris. We knew that coastal canoe trade had been a primary means of moving goods from one place to another in the Maya world. During the Postclassic period, it was thought that this trade had reached its zenith, but we knew relatively little about the mechanics of maritime trade before that time. Ambergris Caye presented both opportunities and impediments to this sort ofcommerce. While Maya 17 18 canoes could easily ply the waters between the coast and the reef, they would need to travel outside of the reef at Rocky Point on Ambergris Caye. At Rocky Point, the reef converges with the island, creating a beautiful and dramatic place but also one that is treacherous for boats even today. The Maya solved this problem by digging a channel across the peninsula at its narrowest point north of Rocky Point. Actually, Ambergris Caye is not an island but a part of Mexico's Xcalac Peninsula, separated from the rest of the land and the country of Mexico by an ancient canal. The Bacalar Chico canal was dug by 600 A.D., if not before. It was easier to dig a one mile long canal than it was to risk the loss of trade goods on the reef. Moreover, if the Maya could dig the much larger canal at Cerros by 300 B.c., certainly they could have dug the Bacalar Chico 900 years later. The channel which separated Ambergris from Mexico, then, was a 'funnel' for trade canoes. These canoes carried everything from salt and food to jade, obsidian, and pottery along the Caribbean coast. Columbus even encountered one which may have been 50 feet long and carried 25 people. Since Ambergris protects Chetumal and Corozal Bays from the open sea, the cut on the northern end, the Bacalar Chico, must have been an important access for the maritime traders. We also knew that the small site of San Juan was on the back side of the island and would be the first place a canoe would encounter after passing through the Bacalar Chico canal. Based upon the excavations and surveys of Ambergris since 1985, we can now reconstruct the archaeology of the island to a large degree. The first known occupation of the island was at Marco Gonzalez where Graham and Pendergast have found deeply buried pottery fragments from the Late Preclassic period. Unfortunately, we know little of these early people except that they were there. Perhaps, these early artifacts are the remains of a fishing station or outpost from a larger mainland community such as Cerros. Much the same is true of the Early Classic period which yields evidence ofoccupation at other sites, Laguna Frances and Yalamha, on the island. Laguna Frances is a large site by island standards and dates mostly to the Late Classic. However, some Early Classic pottery has been found in the backdirt of areas disturbed by looters. 19 ...