Salt: White Gold of the Ancient Maya (review)

To a growing list of studies on pre-Hispanic salt production we can add this detailed archaeological report from the Belize coast during the Late Classic period. On the basis of years of careful fieldwork and analysis, McKillop presents a strong case that salt-making in the Port Honduras zone of the Belize coast involved specialized production for trade into the heavily populated interior of the southern Maya lowlands during its Late Classic (A.D. 600–900) apogee. She identifies four specialized salt workshops on the basis of high concentrations of the kinds of traditional salt-making implements—large unslipped jars, vessel supports, charcoal lenses—that are typical where salts are leached and boiled from salt-laden deposits or highly saline waters. This specialized salt-making assemblage predominates the archaeological record of McKillop's salt-making sites, which lack domestic or burial remains—hence production was removed from domestic context. There is all too little empirical information on specialized production in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, and even less on workshop contexts, so this book makes a very valuable contribution.

Moreover, McKillop extended the fieldwork area into offshore deposits in the low-lying mangroves, encountering the salt workshops in an area that was inundated after the Late Classic. Her offshore excavation methods set a precedent for coastal studies, and her discoveries indicate that coastline changes affect the archaeological record and need to be considered.

Unfortunately, once McKillop enters the wider realm of interpretation, her presentation falls flat. Essentially (22), she sets up a straw man—Anthony Andrews's 1983 idea, based on data available at that time, that the gemlike salt from Yucatan's rich north coast saltworks was shipped by canoe to Belize to supply the southern lowlands population during its apogee. This hypothesis was partially based on Spanish eyewitness accounts, and McKillop rightly points out the mistake of applying the direct historic approach to an archaeological epoch over six hundred years back in the pre-Hispanic past. Yet substantial new research on Maya salt production and trade—including the discovery of previously unknown Late Classic salt-making sites on the Belize coast, by McKillop and others—has changed the picture since 1983. Andrews (1998) has already presented a revised and much more complex discussion, but McKillop unaccountably overlooks this advance and fails in general to grapple with the complexities of much recent, relevant work. Instead, she attempts to overturn an outdated hypothesis simply on the basis of her own new data.

Because salt was made in Belize, she argues, there was no need for north coast salt imports. Her empirical findings, she claims (186) support a model of long-distance trade in which a limited amount of high-value luxury items circulated among social leaders across a broad macroregion—while the supply of everyday bulk resources, such as salt, came from nearby sources.

Yet there are no quantitative estimates that pit Late Classic southern lowlands salt consumption (based on theoretical patterns of human salt consumption and available population data) against the salt production potential of the Belize coast (vital to McKillop's argument but totally unexplored). In contrast, despite McKillop's reservations about past environmental conditions for solar salt production on Yucatan's north coast (25), there is overwhelming evidence that salt surplus has always been produced in Yucatan. At Emal, the north coast's largest saltworks (in use from the Preclassic through the Colonial periods), the Spaniards reaped annual harvests of roughly five thousand metric tons of pure white salt through traditional solar evaporation processes (Andrews 1983; Kepecs 1999, 2002). Throughout the pre-Hispanic sequence there were large population centers within walking distance of Emal—ample labor to produce similar quantities was available at all times.

To support her arguments against salt imports from the north, McKillop cites the absence of Late Classic trade artifacts from Yucatan in her Belize coast assemblages (176, 185). McKillop claims...