With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Heather McKillop and a team of graduate students from Louisiana State University will carry out a three-year underwater archaeology project in Punta Ycacos Lagoon, a coastal lagoon in southern Belize, Central America. The researchers will map the first known ancient Maya wooden buildings, preserved under extraordinary conditions in a peat bog below the sea floor. This is significant, since most modern Maya buildings, both houses and other structures, are wood, and we know from the stone or earthen foundations of ancient buildings, that wooden structures were widespread in antiquity. However, our current knowledge of ancient Maya buildings is based on the stone and adobe buildings and foundations of public and elite architecture and the more humble stone and earth foundations of the common Maya. Wood normally decays in the tropical setting of the Maya area and wooden structural remains have not previously been discovered. A further intellectual merit of the research is that the Punta Ycacos Lagoon buildings were used in the production, storage, and distribution of salt produced by boiling seawater in pots over fires, as indicated by the recovery of the fragmentary remains of the salt pots. Salt was scarce in the interior of the Yucatan where the Classic period civilization developed between A.D. 300 and 900, so this extensive production distant from interior cities suggests there was extensive, non-state controlled production as part of the ancient Maya and other pre-Industrial ancient civilizations.
The research team will travel by boat to the remote coastal lagoon in order to locate, flag, and map the wooden posts, other construction wood, and associated artifacts at the underwater sites and continue the comprehensive underwater search of the lagoon for additional sites. The mapping will be carried out using a total station survey instrument that digitally records locations for transfer to a GIS (geographic information system) on a laptop computer. The resulting maps will show the distribution of sites and variability in the size and shape of buildings, interior rooms, and artifacts. The GIS software will allow the spatial data to be analyzed and displayed to interpret from a micro-scale within buildings to a macro-scale including the entire lagoon. The researchers will date the wooden architecture and sites by radiocarbon dating wooden posts, as well as study of the pottery sherds using the type-variety system of Maya ceramic classification. This system classifies pottery on the basis of chronologically sensitive stylistic changes and allows comparison with other Maya sites. The research will evaluate strategies to excavate selected wooden structures and conserve the waterlogged wood in the future.
In terms of the broader social implications of the research, the project will provide information useful for incorporating into ecotourism in Belize since the wooden architecture provides a new dimension to archaeology in the country. The research will provide ancient analogs with the modern Maya to connect with the wooden structures of the present landscape. The project will provide training of graduate students. The results of the research will be presented in Belize, at international conferences and in publications, and other avenues to inform the scientific community and the interested public. In general, the research will enhance our knowledge of the cultural value of archaeological sites in low-lying coastal areas worldwide that are subject to inundation by sea-level rise and global climate change.
