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CHAPTER 13. Submerged Ancient Saltworks
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131 CHAPTER 13 SUBMERGED ANCIENT SALTWORKS W ith the realization that sea-level rise had submerged Classic Maya sites, we began looking not just in shallow water around known sites such as Wild Cane Cay, but also in shallow water elsewhere in Port Honduras. We found three sites in a coastal lagoon north of Deep River and opposite Wild Cane Cay. While slowly traversing the lagoon in the dory, we looked over the gunwales for artifacts on the seafloor. My strategy was for whoever saw artifacts to immediately jump overboard to mark the spot and determine whether it was in fact a site. The rule was that someone had to stay on board, preferably the driver. Since Orlando liked to cut the engine and jump overboard in search of possible sites, I normally stayed in the dory. I had images of the dory motoring away while we stood in the water. In 1991 we found three underwater sites in Punta Ycacos Lagoon.1 Although it was difficult to describe their locations, I always found them once I was immersed in the landscape of red mangroves that fringed the lagoon shores and formed ephemeral islands. My system broke down, however, after Hurricane Iris whipped across the land on October 8, 2001, at 140 mph, uprooting trees and defoliating the mangroves. By that time I had begun to record the location of sites with a global positioning system (GPS), which had become critical to relocating the underwater sites once the landscape markers were destroyed (figure 13.1). Stingray Lagoon was the first underwater site we found, and we excavated it in 1991.2 The site wasn’t really underwater in the sense of our having to wear scuba gear. However, it was about 300 meters offshore in the center of 132 i n s e a r c h o f o t h e r m a y a s i t e s 13.1 Using a global positioning system (GPS) to record location of underwater site in Punta Ycacos Lagoon. Punta Ycacos Lagoon — just north of Deep River (figure 13.2). The site lay under about a meter of water, which meant that the sea level had risen more than that for the spot to have once been dry land. Even with a microtidal variation of about 50 cm between high and low tides, the living surface of an ancient community had to be enough above sea level to be permanently dry, including accommodating tidal variations. When I first reported Stingray Lagoon at the Society for American Archaeology annual conference, some members of the audience chuckled at the sight of transit mapping in the water and people standing in waist-high water with shovels and excavation screens. Now my colleagues simply accept that my slides will be wet and muddy, and the only outbursts of laughter are from newcomers. Neither my students nor the volunteers knew that setting up the transit in the sea to make a map with a stadia rod and hundred-meter tape was unusual. I know the site was 310 meters offshore because Melissa took the stadia rod to the north shore, stopping each 10 meters to take an elevation — or perhaps we should have called it a depth reading. We had set up a protective net around the main part of the site where we were mapping and excavating. The net protected us from stingrays that were attracted to the silt that we stirred [44.222.146.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:45 GMT) Submerged Ancient Saltworks 133 13.2 Air view of Punta Ycacos Lagoon, where saltwork sites were discovered in the water. up as we walked. Melissa was mapping beyond the net, so I sent a volunteer to be a lookout for stingrays and other creatures. Partway across, I noticed that the volunteer was simply snorkeling — not much of a lookout. Melissa, as she reminds me from time to time, was well aware of the potential danger to which the volunteer seemed oblivious. They made it back safely, and fortunately the mapping had to be done only once. Our excavations at Stingray Lagoon called for innovative techniques in order to locate and recover the evidence from the inundated setting. One of the appeals of field archaeology is figuring out what methods are appropriate in different situations. Fortunately, at Stingray Lagoon and the other underwater sites in Punta Ycacos Lagoon we have excavated, the sites are shallow enough to...