In Search of Maya Sea Traders

NOTES

chapter 1 1. Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers had disrupted a thriving coastal canoe trade around the Yucatan, extending even beyond the Maya area to the Gulfs of Mexico and Honduras (see Sabloff and Rathje 1975). Was sea trade also characteristic of the earlier Classic Period, when great city-states rose to prominence in the southern Maya lowlands of Guatemala and Belize between a.d. 300 and 900? Alternatively, did trade take place by overland trails and rivers at that time, and did sea trade develop only after the collapse of the southern city-states and the rise of Chichen Itza and other cities in the northern Maya lowlands? I hoped to investigate the timing and importance of sea trade and its relationship to the inland cities, particularly those in southern Belize: Lubaantun, Nim Li Punit, Uxbenka, and Pusilha. The royal and other wealthy Maya at cities in the interior of the Yucatan peninsula imported exotic materials such as jade, obsidian, mercury, and painted pots as status markers for use in public feasting, bloodletting, and other ceremonies and as gifts to help cement good relations with rulers in other lowland city-states (Culbert 1991; Inomata and Houston 2001; Masson and Freidel 2002; Reents-Budet 1994). The inland elite also desired resources from the sea, including stingray spines for bloodletting; fish and salt for food; conch shells for musical instruments; manatee bones for carving figurines; and coral and other items from the sea for food, ritual, and perhaps utilitarian uses (McKillop 2002, 2004a, 2004b). From my previous fieldwork at Moho Cay and also because the inland Maya desired resources from the sea as well as from more distant areas, my impression was that sea trade was important in the Classic period. Certainly coastal-inland trade was a feature of this era, but whether this was integrated with sea trade would be determined by my research (see also McKillop and Healy 1989 for other research on the coastal Maya). For my Master’s thesis research at Trent University, I had carried out excavations at Moho Cay, a Classic Maya trading port located in the mouth of the Belize River. The river provided access to important Maya cities, such as Tikal, in the central Maya area of the Peten district of Guatemala and to closer sites in the upper Belize valley of western Belize, such as Xunantunich, Baking Pot, and Cahal Pech. See McKillop (1980, 1984, 1985, and 2004a) and Healy et al. (1984) for publications on the Moho Cay excavations. When the site was destroyed for tourism development, I decided to look for a more remote area for Ph.D. fieldwork. I took advantage of my stay in Belize in 1981, when I taught a course on Maya archaeology to the guides of 191 NOTES the public archaeological sites in Belize through a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) grant to my former M.A. advisor, Paul Healy. After the course, I investigated the coastal area in the far south of Belize, about which I’d read reports by early adventurers, travelers, and archaeologists in a general review of the literature on everything I could find on the coastal Maya. 2. Lubaantun had drawn much public attention in the wake of reports of a crystal skull allegedly found at the base of a mound by Anna Mitchell-Hedges on her sixteenth birthday, when she accompanied her father, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges (1931), on a British Museum expedition to southern Belize. The British Museum’s work, together with excavations in 1970 by Norman Hammond (1975) indicated that Lubaantun was a Late Classic city with impressive public buildings faced with local sandstone. The lack of carved monuments, stelae, commemorating with hieroglyphs various events by the city’s leaders is perplexing, considering the city’s large size and its evident political and economic importance in the region. Work by Richard Leventhal (1990) at nearby Nim Li Punit and Uxbenka — smaller cities with carved stelae — may reveal the political economy of the region. Pusilha was explored by the British Museum in the 1920s and again, beginning in 2002, by Geoffrey Braswell. 3. The earliest excavations on Wild Cane Cay were by Thomas W. F. Gann, the medical officer to the then colony of British Honduras. Excavating in mounds in 1908 and 1909 and again in 1911 and 1917 (Gann 1911, 1917, 1918, 135–36), Gann determined that they were constructed of coral and mainland stone and contained human burials. In 1914 Herbert Spinden made subsequent investigations (Kidder 1954...