10
Perishable Resources Produced for Exchange in the Chunchucmil Economic Region

Mineral Resources

Salt

As is well known, salt is a human necessity of life, particularly in the tropics. Yet some of the most heavily populated regions of the Classic-period Maya world, such as the Petén of northern Guatemala and southern Campeche, Mexico, lacked significant salt sources (A. P. Andrews 1983; Rathje 1971). Though small quantities of salt can be acquired by burning certain species of palm trees and consuming the ash, this is a time-consuming process that would not be able to feed the millions of Classic-period Maya people on a regular basis (A. P. Andrews 1984). Salt can be found in abundance on the coast of Yucatán at Las Coloradas and Celestún, Mesoamerica’s first and second largest saltworks. Compared to the Las Coloradas salt flats, the Celestún salt flats are 250 km closer to the Petén by boat. At both locations, solar evaporation of seawater in artificially modified salt flats produces thick crusts of salt in the dry season. Salt makers today use salt plucked directly from solar evaporation pans to make table salt but only after washing it in briny water in order to clean it and purify it to meet professional standards. Though Celestún salt is not used for table salt today, it was consumed locally and exported to the Petén in the colonial period (A.P. Andrews 1983). Furthermore, high strontium-isotope ratios indicate that people from Tikal consumed sea salt in the Classic period (Wright 2005). Though people from Tikal probably imported some of their salt from the coast of what is now Belize, where salt was produced by boiling water (McKillop 2002), salt from evaporation pans at places like Celestún is of higher quality, is easier to produce/harvest, and may have been consumed by Tikal’s elites (MacKinnon and Kepecs 1989).

Salt from Celestún could also be used as a mordant for dyes, as a preservative for fish, shellfish, meat, and other organics (A. P. Andrews 1983; McKillop 2002), and perhaps as salt licks strategically placed in or near agricultural plots to attract game animals. An ethno-archaeological study of contemporary salt extraction on the Celestún Peninsula showed that salt harvesting does not require imperishable tools (Bezanilla 1995).

Metates provide a possible non-perishable line of evidence for talking about salt. Metates have generally been ignored by Maya archaeologists, presumably because they were ubiquitous in households and were used primarily for processing maize, the most important staple crop in Mesoamerica. They were therefore thought to hold very little other information of importance. They piqued our interest because some of the well-bounded residential groups at Chunchucmil seemed to have more of them than could be expected merely for grinding a household’s corn. In a sample of 392 architectural groups enclosed by albarrada walls (Magnoni et al. 2012), there is a positive correlation between the number of metates per houselot and the amount of architecture per group (r = 0.36). This means that in general, groups with more buildings have more metates. If amount of architecture indicates the number of people living in a group, this correlation could simply be taken to mean that the number of metates in a group rises when there are more people in the group. However, of the 47 groups in the sample of 392 that have five or more metates, half of them (n = 23) are relatively small groups (five or fewer structures). Furthermore, although the group (N4W1-Q) with the largest number of metates (n = 25) has the second-largest number of structures (n = 22) in the sample, the groups (S1E3-B and S1W1-F) with the second and third largest numbers of metates (20 and 18) have only six and five structures, respectively. Finally, though the average number of metates per structure in the sample of 392 groups is 0.37, several groups have two to three times as many metates as structures. In sum, it seems clear that at least some households were using metates for something other than domestic needs.

Watanabe (2000) examined variation among metates in greater detail by analyzing 109 metates and three mano fragments from a sample of 13 residential groups that had a large number of metates. The large number of metates per household does not appear to have been simply the result of accumulation of exhausted metates at groups that had a longer period of habitation. Indeed, of the 109 metates, 25 percent (n = 27) were whole, 23 percent (n = 25) were broken but with all of the parts present, and 52 percent (n = 57) were fragmented and incomplete. That over 75 percent of the sample were broken is not surprising as the local limestones are soft and easily broken. However, the 46 percent that were either whole or broken with all their parts present suggest that close to this number were intact and probably in use when these households were abandoned.

As discussed in chapter 2, there are three types of metates: trough metates, basin metates, and querns. Watanabe assigned the metates to these types and measured all aspects of metate interiors and exteriors. Eighty-eight percent of Watanabe’s metates (n = 96) were trough metates, which is not surprising as they are the most common form throughout northern Yucatán in general. They were produced by using a mano in a back-and-forth motion, which ultimately creates a trough that is longer in one direction than in another. Twelve metates (11% of the sample) were basin metates with circular depressions created by using a narrower mano in a circular motion. An area with a diameter of about 10 to 15 cm was worn 3–8 cm deeper on one part of the floor of the basin where people probably began grinding a substance in its coarsest form. Basin metates, while less frequent, are also found at other Yucatecan sites. Querns are totally unique to Chunchucmil, not only in Yucatán but throughout the rest of Mesoamerica, Central America, and the Caribbean. Querns resemble basin metates in having been created by applying a mano in a circular motion, but they may have interior sides that have been substantially undercut by the edges of the mano, creating overhanging walls. They have a spillway cut through the upper lip, presumably to drain away some of the lighter portion that has risen to the top of the substance being ground. Though we documented only 74 querns at the site, the actual total was likely higher, since spillways are often hard to notice in fragmented metates.

The three forms—troughs, basins and querns—as well as the large variety of sizes, suggest a diversity of uses in addition to maize processing. Archaeological or ethnographical sources document the use of metates to grind salt, pigments, calcite, insects, cacao beans, various herbs and other plant foods, and the meat and bones of animals and fish. Metates are also used as containers for liquids and to wash clothes. Horsfall (1987) observed ethnographically that grinding stones with the smallest grinding surfaces (200 to 1,600 cm²) are used for grinding cacao, salt, herbs, and other substances; the middle range (400–2,200 cm²) is typically used for grinding maize; and metates with the largest grinding surfaces (1200–2400 cm²) are used to wash clothes. According to Watanabe’s measurements, the area of Chunchucmil’s trough metates ranges from 672 to 1,972 cm² (mean = 1,254 cm²), thus accommodating all of the above activities.

Smaller basin metates and querns could have been used for maize processing but these stones were not ideally suited to it. Given the proximity of the Celestún salinas to the Gulf Coast maritime trade route and the high regard with which the Maya held salt, salt grinding on basin metates and querns is highly probable. However, salt is best traded and transported in rough chunks or cakes; finer grinding of salt is done just before consumption. For these reasons no prehispanic metates were found in the survey of the Celestún salinas, an extraction area where people did not live. On the other hand, if salt were used as a consumable currency, as it often is worldwide, then it might have been ground regularly at Chunchucmil as part of its market system. Similarly, if salt were regularly used as an industrial product, such as a mordant for pigments and dyes, it might also have been processed at Chunchucmil and supplied to production specialists.

Floral Resources

Achiote (Annatto, Recado Rojo)

Achiote, a Nahuatl word for Bixa orellana, is the most widely used red food colorant in the world today (Bixa is a Taino word). Achiote is also used as a dye for lipstick, suntan lotion, nail polish, hair oil, lotions, ointments, textiles, soap, candles, leather, floor and shoe polishes, wood stains, brass lacquer, furniture polish, and varnish (Watanabe 2000:80). Its cultivation and use is well-known in both highland and lowland environments throughout the American tropics, and achiote has been used in many ways by historic and ancient populations (Watanabe 2000:67–91). It has been used as a dye for fabrics (particularly cotton) and other arts and crafts. Its popularity as a body paint and hair colorant is well-known; in fact, the origin of the term Redskins for the Indians of the New World may derive from their widespread practice of applying achiote pigment to their skins (Coe 1994:143). It has been used as a pigment in mural painting (Heinerman 1996:20). It has been used as a mosquito repellent, an astringent, an antiseptic, and possibly an expectorant (Oviedo, quoted in Standley 1920:836). It has medicinal properties for several gastrointestinal disorders (Rees 1819; Wisdom 1940:366). It has been used in agricultural rituals in which the tiny seeds (about the size of a grape seed) are associated with rain drops (Hamman 1998:331). The Lacandon paint their incense burners with it (Tozzer 1907:72–73, 141). Like salt and cacao, it was used as a form of currency in protohistoric times. Known as ki’wi’ or k’uxub in Maya (Barrera Marín, Barrera Vásquez, and López Franco 1976), this red paste or powder is the most widely used condiment in Yucatecan cuisine today, and is often grown in dooryard gardens close to kitchens and domestic structures (see Tozzer 1941:200). It is used as a seasoning in many Mesoamerican dishes, including as a flavoring and coloring for chocolate drinks (Coe 1994:143; Hughes 1672:122; Morton 1960:303).

Achiote is native to Yucatán and well suited to local growing conditions, as limited as they are by thin soils and rainfall deficits (Beach 1998a; Dahlin et al. 2005). Today it grows wild around Chunchucmil. Watanabe (2000:83), citing Baer (1976:69), observes that achiote is amenable to commercial production. “B. orellana grows well under cultivation in seasonal tropical climates with well-marked dry periods . . . A common practice is to plant the trees in rough terrain and rocky soils where the growing of other crops would be difficult or impossible . . . and [it] also grows where inundated or in periodically brackish water.” The latter conditions prevail in the savanna and freshwater swamps to the west of the site.

Achiote is a fast-maturing shrubby tree that can be pruned every two or so years to a height of 3–4 m to make harvesting easier and to increase yields. Therefore, several achiote trees can be crammed into a relatively small space for a tree crop, and each tree yields 1–5 kg of seed on average per year (Watanabe 2000:84). Processing entails either grinding the seeds on metates and boiling the powder into a paste (Wisdom 1940:31), or soaking and fermenting first and then grinding into a paste (Morton 1960:305; Standley 1920:835). The paste is formed into loafs or cakes and then sun-dried and either used domestically or traded in that form.

Specialized processing instruments might include wooden tubs for soaking, metates for grinding, and large ceramic jars for boiling and/or soaking. Watanabe makes a strong case that of the three types of metates discussed above, querns are ideal for making achiote. When the seeds are soaked, a soluble yellowish fraction (known as orellin) floats to the top, while the relatively insoluble red pigment (bixin) stays in the bottom of the depression. As the seeds were ground in liquid, the yellow fraction would be pushed out the spillway. The desired red pigment would be collected in the depression after it had dried into either a paste or powder. It could then be mixed with fat or oil solvents or other gums or honey when applying as a dye.

Long-distance exports of achiote to areas outside of its native habitat are widely reported in the ethnohistoric literatures of North, Central, and South America. Because of its ubiquity and the fact that its preparation is not very labor intensive, it would probably not have had a high market value except perhaps in those few areas where it could not be grown. Achiote is said to have been traded widely by the Putún or Chontal Maya who occupied the Gulf Coast (Thompson 1970:156), implicating the Chunchucmil region as a potential major source area.

Cotton

Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) played a large role in the exchange of bulk luxuries throughout the prehistory of Mesoamerica (e.g., King 1979:267), and particularly in the Late Postclassic period (Berdan 1987; McAnany 2010; M. E. Smith 2003; Stark et al. 1998). Northern Yucatán in particular was likely a large exporter of cotton in prehispanic times (Roys 1957:11; Tozzer 1941:94). The importance of cotton textiles to the Maya is underscored by many painted Classic-period vases that depict men offering textiles to rulers. Women, however, most likely produced both elaborate cotton clothing and plain cotton mantles, thus highlighting the critical role they played in political economies (Ardren et al. 2010; Clark and Houston 1998; Hendon 1997; Vail and Stone 2002). Throughout the Classic-period artistic corpus, Maya elites are shown wearing loose cotton huipils or loincloths, many of them highly embellished with woven or brocaded designs (Anawalt 1981; Schevill et al. 1991). Richard Blanton and coauthors, citing several primary and secondary sources, list the following uses for cotton cloth: “clothing, household utilitarian, medicinal, decorative hanging, religious offering, mummy bundling, gifting (including those given to commemorate rites of passage), and as armor [and] . . . an important commodity form of money” (2005:270). Ethnohistoric sources describe cotton as the second most important product in Yucatán, after salt (Tozzer 1941). The annual local variety (Gossypium hirsutum laetifolium Hutch) of cotton grows wild at Chunchucmil today as well as on the sandy soils of the Celestún Peninsula and elsewhere along the north coast.

However, since domestic cotton grows best in areas with between 1,000 and 1,500 mm of rain (Purseglove 1968:348), and since Chunchucmil’s annual rainfall is normally below this, cotton might only thrive in cultivated plots if it were watered. This may be why Roys (1957:11) notes that specific mentions of cotton growing are sparse in the colonial documents from towns in the vicinity of ancient Chunchucmil. At the same time, Farriss (1984:39) notes that the Maya of Yucatán grew cotton in their milpas without supervision from the Spaniards and their record keepers. It is therefore worth exploring the hypothesis that Chunchucmil produced cotton commercially and exported it in bulk in the Early Classic period.

This hypothesis is problematic, however, because extensive excavations at many Maya sites have produced rather few tools for spinning and weaving thread (McAnany and Plank 2001:96, cf. Ardren et al. 2010). At Chunchucmil, we have found only six ceramic spindle whorls in all excavations and no bone needles, although bone preservation is extremely poor at the site. Extensive excavations at Dzibilchaltún, which is similar to Chunchucmil in terms of climate and soil cover, yielded only five spindle whorls (Taschek 1994:215). Comparable data from the nearest contemporary urban center, Oxkintok, are not available. From Ceibal in the western Petén and Barton Ramie in the Belize River valley, spinning implements recovered by the Harvard projects total nine and five, respectively (Willey 1978:47; Willey et al. 1965:402). In a recent analysis of the spindle whorls of the Yucatán Peninsula, Hernández and Peniche noted a total of 191 items recovered from 10 sites, 147 of which came from Chichén Itzá, the most thoroughly excavated site in the northern lowlands. Hernandez and Peniche note this sample spans the Middle Preclassic through Postclassic, and that the frequency of whorls doubles in the Postclassic period (Hernández Alvarez and Peniche May 2008:table 1). This confirms a pattern of low recovery rates at earlier sites, but suggests that further excavation may yield larger samples. They also note some spindle whorls were made from lithic materials, or perishable substances such as bone and cocoyol nut wood (Hernández Alvarez and Peniche May 2008). Ardren et al. (2010) recovered 17 spindle whorls from a single Terminal Classic platform at the site of Xuenkal, located along trade routes between Chichén Itzá and the coast. The authors suggest this sample differs so dramatically with earlier patterns in Yucatán due to the processes of economic intensification involved in the tribute-based economy of Chichén Itzá. The presence of 76 spindle whorls in the sample from Cozumel may be explained in the same manner (Phillips 1979). However, only 32 ceramic spindle whorls were recovered from the three major archaeological projects at Mayapán, which is described as a tribute-based center in contact-era ethnohistoric documents (Tozzer 1941; Masson and Peraza Lope 2014:299).

There are at least five ways to explain this paucity of spindle whorls at Classic-period sites. First, spinning and weaving may have been primarily an elite activity. Spinning and weaving tools are more common in elite contexts (Chase et al. 2008; Halperin 2008; Hendon 1997:44; McAnany 2010:117, 186). On the other hand, ethnohistorical and ethnographic sources describe weaving as an activity for women of all statuses (McAnany 2010:117). Second, as Hernández Alvarez and Peniche May (2008) have noted, spindle whorls were made from perishable organic materials (e.g., bone or wood) rather than from fired clay. Third, it is possible that a great deal of cotton was grown at Chunchucmil—lands a few kilometers to the east have better soils and higher rainfall—but this raw cotton was exported in bulk to be made into cloth elsewhere. Fourth, it is possible that Chunchucmil had an avid interest in the cotton industry and imported already-spun and -woven cotton cloth from elsewhere and perhaps dyed and decorated it here. Finally, it remains possible that Chunchucmil had no real interest in cotton production.

Data from Teotihuacan suggest that the third possibility—exporting of raw or spun cotton—is plausible. Cowgill (2007:282) states that the occupants of the Merchants’ Barrio at Teotihuacan likely imported cotton from the lowlands. Though most of the ceramics from the Merchants’ Barrio are local Teotihuacan wares, up to 10 percent are imports from the Gulf Coast of Veracruz and the Maya lowlands. Very few spindle whorls have been recovered from Teotihuacan, but bone needles for embroidery are more common. Though Teotihuacanos may have used perishable spindle whorls to spin raw cotton into thread, it is also possible that Teotihuacan imported textiles. Some of this cotton, either raw or in the form of textiles, probably came from Veracruz, which produced cotton vigorously in the Classic period (Stark et al. 1998). The presence of Maya ceramics at the Merchants’ Barrio suggests that some of the cotton may have also come from Yucatán. Chapter 12 documents architectural and ceramic evidence for connections between Chunchucmil and Teotihuacan. So it is possible that the Chunchucmil region exported raw cotton in bulk to Teotihuacan and elsewhere.

Another source of a silky fiber very similar to cotton is the ceiba tree (Ceiba pentandra), which is extremely common in the forest of northern Yucatán, especially in the scrub forests behind the coast. This waterproof fiber was widely used for textile batting or stuffing until the development of polyesters. Ceiba fibers are generally considered too slippery to spin into thread or cloth; however, some historians believe Maya weavers may have been able to ply ceiba with cotton to make a useable thread. Ceiba fluff was likely the material of choice to fill the large cushions that adorned palace thrones, as shown on Classic-period painted ceramic vases. Bark paper, or amate, is made from the wild fig tree (Ficus glabrata) which is native to Yucatán, and was made in the prehispanic era. Although best known as the material from which Maya codices were constructed, it has been suggested that commoners wore bark paper clothing which could have been stamped with geometric designs resembling woven cloth (McAnany 2010:122).

Cochineal

Cochineal, also known as carmine dye, is one of the most light- and heat-stable and oxidation-resistant of all the natural colorants. It is derived from the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus), which lives on nopal, a cactus from the genus Opuntia. The 150 varieties of Opuntia are widely dispersed throughout the world, and while the cochineal insect will inhabit all or most of them, it is the Opuntia indicamil that is used as the insect’s cultivated host in Mexico; in fact, Opuntia ficus-indica was domesticated in Central Mexico (Griffith 2004). Although most cochineal is derived from farming nopal and caring intensively for the cochineal insect, it can also be collected in the wild (Aldama-Aguilera et al. 2005). The dye, which deters predation by other insects, is extracted from the insect’s body and eggs. The existence of wild cochineal species, natural enemies, extreme temperatures, rainfalls out of season, high luminosity, and strong winds make cochineal production difficult (Aldama-Aguilera et al. 2005) and extremely labor intensive. Converting insect to dye involves extracting female cochineal insects from nopal, killing them with hot water, steam, or ovens, drying and pulverizing the insect bodies, and then boiling the powder in a solution with sodium carbonate or ammonia. Depending on purity and how the solution is further treated, cochineal dyes can come out in a variety of tints of orange, red, and purple.

Demand for cochineal is known to have been high in the Late Postclassic. For example, 11 Aztec cities conquered by Montezuma in the fifteenth century paid a yearly tribute of 2,000 decorated cotton blankets and 40 bags of cochineal dye each. Demand for cochineal in Europe during the colonial period was even greater (Baskes 2000; Hamnett 1971). Cochineal adheres more firmly and produces a deeper color in wool, introduced to the New World in the colonial period, than in prehispanic fabrics made of cotton and agave fiber. Produced almost exclusively in Oaxaca at that time, cochineal became Mexico’s second-most-valued export after silver.

Yucatán was a producer of cochineal in colonial times (Contreras Sánchez 1996). Chunchucmil is an ideal location to produce cochineal in that nopal is an unusually hardy plant that grows in extremely thin soils and seemingly the smallest cracks in large expanses of exposed bedrock. Large expanses of bare bedrock are included in many houselots or solares at Chunchucmil. Try as we might, we have not been able to figure out why it was so apparently important to include these seemingly useless patches within solares. However, many of them currently support wild (uncultivated) nopal and the tell-tale white crust of the cochineal insect’s presence is common. Finally, Bernal Díaz del Castillo noted the presence of cochineal in southern Campeche while he was with Cortés crossing the base of the Yucatán Peninsula to get to Honduras in 1523. Díaz’s comments attest to the use of cochineal in the Maya lowlands. Nopal probably had other uses: today it is widely used as a fence throughout the arid areas of South America (Flores-Flores and Tekelenburg 1995; Matallo et al. 2002) and various forms of cactus are used today in many parts of the Gulf Coast region as fences around houselots. If planted densely around a houselot’s perimeter, nopal’s prickly paddles would provide an almost impenetrable fence. In parts of Chunchucmil, such as the southwest, where chichbes—slightly raised linear stone surfaces usually 2–3 m wide (see chapter 2)—are common, they often encircle houselots, serving more as houselot boundaries than as alleys. If nopal were cultivated on top of these chichbes, this would make the chichbes’ purpose as a boundary much more intelligible. Of course nopal’s paddles and fruit are widely consumed today as food. Nopal grown as fences on chichbes could have also been used to harvest cochineal. Given that harvesting cochineal is difficult, having the nopal cacti right outside the house makes this labor more convenient, although, realistically, a few plants in a domestic compound would not yield a significant amount of cochineal dye unless combined across many households.

Thus, Chunchucmil is a good candidate for cochineal dye production. Conditions are excellent for nopal, the plant that hosts the cochineal insect, and nopal was desirable for other reasons as well. Since salt serves as an excellent mordant for dyes, the abundance of salt at Chunchucmil enhances the potential for cochineal dye to have been a significant component of the ancient economy.

Logwood/Palo de Tinte Dye

The heartwood of the palo de tinte tree (Haematoxylum campechianum), or Ek’ in Maya (Barrera Marín, Barrera Vásquez, and López Franco 1976) and “logwood” (and sometimes “bloodwood”) in English, contains a brilliant red dye called hematoxylin. The chemical composition of hematoxylin is almost identical to brazilin, the dye that comes from brazilwood (Haematoxylum brasiletto). Boiling chips of the heartwood in water produces orange/red crystals. A broad range of colors, including blue, purple, burgundy, and lavender, can be produced by oxidizing the crystals or adding mordants. Palo de tinte, which takes its species name from the Mexican state of Campeche, grows in seasonally inundated wetlands, along river banks, as well as islands, or petenes, in the broad estuaries that shroud most of the peninsular coast (Contreras Sánchez 1991).

There is good evidence that logwood dyes from the Gulf Coast were produced in prehispanic times (Contreras Sánchez 1991:27; cf. also Roys 1943:51; 1957:18). In the sixteenth century the Spanish used native labor to exploit logwood, exporting large cargoes of the valuable heartwood from the coast. Production along the Gulf Coast fell into English hands in the seventeenth century and English logwood cutters established camps in lagoons up and down the coast. The English also cut logwood in Cabo Catoche, Quintana Roo, and in Belize. Spaniards regained control of logwood production on the Gulf Coast in the eighteenth century. Production reached its peak in the nineteenth century, when the highly prized heartwood fetched about 100 pounds sterling per ton in England (Contreras Sánchez 1991). When John Lloyd Stephens traveled from Palenque to Mérida in 1840 along the west coast of Yucatán, he reported a dozen ships in the port of Laguna de Términos waiting to be loaded with logwood destined for Europe and the United States (Stephens 1969:391). When Stephens later visited Siho, located 18 km south of Chunchucmil, he noticed a high volume of logwood production (see also Roys 1957:18). At the end of the nineteenth century, the logwood industry declined due to the rise of synthetic dyes that were cheaper to produce.

To move the heartwood from the forests and petenes to the coast, producers used rivers whenever possible. On the northern Gulf Coast of Campeche and Yucatán, which lacks rivers, canals that extended for several kilometers were cut out of the mangrove estuaries and swamps in historic times (Millet Cámara 1984). One such canal was cut in from the coast directly west of Chunchucmil in the nineteenth century (see chapter 12, this volume; Hixson 2011:64). In the historic era, one local hacendado also processed the heartwood into dyes at the hacienda of Tankuche (Stephens 1843:202), located 15 km south of Chunchucmil.

In sum, logwood dye stands as another perishable product that people from Chunchucmil produced and exported. As noted in chapter 6, Chunchucmil is situated about as close to the seasonally inundated savanna as was possible and this is the natural habitat for palo de tinte. Furthermore, production of palo de tinte boomed quite close to Chunchucmil for hundreds of years. Finally, as was the case with cochineal, Chunchucmil had all the salt it would ever need on hand to serve (or export) as mordants for the dye.

Cordage Products

The ancient Maya used reeds, grasses, vines, palm leaves, and other plant fibers for an astounding and often overlooked array of goods: hats, sandals, capes, garments, baskets, bins, mats, bags, twine, rope, fasteners, curtains, and more (Ardren, in press). The writings of Bishop Diego de Landa and other ethnohistoric documents, such as the Motul and Vienna dictionaries, confirm that craftspeople used plant fibers for a rich assortment of goods, or what Landa described as “an infinity of things,” during the contact period (Landa 1978:102). Baskets, mats, rope, hats, and nets are all well represented in the artistic corpus of the Classic period (Carrasco Vargas, Vásquez López, and Martin 2009; Clark and Houston 1998; Houston 2013; Mefford 1992; Taschek 1994). The central place of cordage products continues into the ethnographic present. Osborne (1965:197) comments that among the twentieth-century Maya, “baskets of all shapes and sizes are necessary to the daily life of Indian and ladino alike from the time he is laid in a basket cradle at birth until his death, when small baskets of food are laid beside him to provide nourishment on his long journey into the afterlife.” Today Yucatán is home to expert plant-fiber artisans, who preserve local traditions of plant-fiber processing and use. Within the peninsula there is a rich and diverse tradition of plant-fiber technology—products from many different plant species are used in a wide variety of woven forms and purposes. Yucatecan artisans are famous for specialized products made of henequen and jipijapa, both of which require elaborate processing and expert weaving skills. The bejuco vine is used for a variety of forms, and there are at least seven varieties of palms whose leaves are used for different purposes, including basketry, rope, and of course thatch (Rodríguez Lazcano and Torres Quintero 1992:13).

Plant materials for these goods were available to some degree all over the Maya area. However, the savanna to the west of Chunchucmil and the petenes of higher ground, freshwater, and tall forests, also to the west, provided and continue to provide cordage material in abundance today. The area to the west of Chunchucmil would have been a special resource for Chunchucmil precisely because its inhospitability to farmers helped preserve it as a natural warehouse for cordage material. Maya cities further inland lacked such a cornucopia of plant fiber. Obviously, Chunchucmil itself had a high demand for these goods, but we speculate that the people of Chunchucmil had more than they needed and could have exported it to inland population centers.

Stone tool use-wear analysis supports the point that certain households specialized in the processing of fibers. In particular, excavations in the Aak houselot (S2E2-F; see chapter 12) yielded more obsidian than any other context at the site and this high figure does not reflect excavation bias (Hutson et al., 2006). Since over 90 percent of the obsidian recovered from the Aak group consists of prismatic blade fragments, the occupants specialized (sensu Clark 1995), not in working obsidian, but in an activity that used obsidian blades as a tool. To help identify this activity, Hutson examined use wear through high-power magnification (Aoyama 1995; Keeley 1980; Lewenstein 1981, 1987; Semenov 1964) of the cutting edges of a systematic random sample of 66 blades from contexts throughout the site. Microscopic use-wear analyses presume that the materials with which a tool comes into contact and the way in which the tool moves among these materials leave diagnostic wear patterns on the tool itself. To determine how a tool was used (chopping, scraping, cutting, sawing, etc.) and what materials it was used on (bone, meat, wood, grasses, etc.), microscopically observed traces on archaeologically recovered stone tools must be compared with microscopic traces on experimentally used stone tools. In Mesoamerica, experimental archaeology conducted by Suzanne Lewenstein (1987) has produced diagnostic use-wear patterns of obsidian tools used in a variety of ways and on a variety of materials common in the Maya area. Wear patterns on blades at Chunchucmil were compared to those created experimentally by Lewenstein and others. The most obvious difference between the blades from the Aak group and those from other areas of the site is that 82 percent (14 of 17) of the blades from the Aak group, as opposed to 22 percent (11 of 49) of the blades from the rest of the site, had parallel striations that result from slicing coarse fibers. The coarse fiber in question is most likely agave, given that it grows very well in northwestern Yucatán. We (Dahlin et al. 2005) have suggested agave hearts as an important food at Chunchucmil, and it should also be noted that ancient Maya commoners may have worn clothing made from agave fiber (they may have also worn bark-fiber clothing McAnany 2010). Cotton is too soft to account for the wear patterns. A specific fiber-working activity that might account for the use wear on the obsidian blades is preparing plant fibers for basketry. Baskets would have been in high demand at Chunchucmil for transporting and shipping salt from the coastal salt flats.

Roofing Thatch

Though palm leaves are excellent for making some of the cordage products discussed in the previous section, their use as roofing material deserves special note. Grasses can also be used to thatch roofs, but in the Chunchucmil region today traditional builders use palm leaves. Several palm species are used, including Sabal yapa Wright ex Beccari (guano, guano macho, xa’anjulok san), Thrinax radiata Loddiges ex Schultes & Schultes f. (chit), Sabal mexicana Martius (guano, guano bon, xa’an, bon xa’an), and Sabal mauritiiformis (H. Karsten) Grisebach & H. Wendland (botan, xa’an). Sabal palms are ubiquitous across the various microenvironments of the peninsula, but they grow best in the wet, rich soils and closed canopy of the savanna zones (Pulido and Caballero 2006). Thus, as with cordage products, Chunchucmil, unlike population centers further inland, was blessed with an abundance of palm in the savanna to the west (Ardren n pres). The soft-wooded trunks of these palms are easy to cut and work and therefore are often used as construction materials after their leaf-producing capacities are exhausted.

Given that most ancient houses were made with perishable roofs, as opposed to stone vaults, the demand for palm fronds would have been quite significant. Using figures from modern domestic construction techniques in Yaxuná, Yucatán, which we will assume are relatively similar to thatching techniques of the past, conservatively 4,000 guanos or palm leaves would be required to thatch an 18-m² domestic structure. This type of roof will be under constant maintenance and repair with the entire set of fronds or guano replaced after approximately 10 years. Thus, a site with a few hundred houses will need about a million palm fronds every decade. Studies of Sabal mexicana and Sabal yapa in Yucatán have shown that these palms produce only about 6–12 leaves per year when managed in a sustainable manner according to traditional Maya forest-management techniques used across the peninsula (Martínez-Ballesté et al. 2008:1322). These techniques are aggressive, and harvest all but a single frond once a year, in part because these palm species regenerate faster when harvested at this rate compared to a less-aggressive harvesting regime or when not harvested at all (Martínez-Ballesté et al. 2008:1323). However this still results in the need for a staggering amount of palms in the forests of the peninsula to accommodate this particular usage of palm fronds.

As almost certainly in the past, few houselot gardens are without several guano trees whose palm fronds can be used to make repairs to roofs, but wholly new roofs require far more than a typical garden can provide; these materials must be brought in from outside. The most likely source of bulk thatch is the savanna, which provides the overwhelming majority of the thatch used in the homes of Chunchucmil’s current population. Today, people from the village of Chunchucmil have no trouble acquiring palm leaves. Further inland, however, the scarcity of palm has made palm fronds expensive enough to discourage the construction of houses with thatch roofs. We suggest that the ancient inhabitants of Chunchucmil could have provisioned inland populations with palm fronds for roofs. In historic and modern times, guano leaves have been widely used to make brooms (escobas). Whether or not this was the case in prehispanic times is not known.

Other Forest Products

While the following forest products were probably not exported from the Chunchucmil region, they bear mentioning, because there was no need to import them. The forests of northwest Yucatán have a large number of hardwood trees that have long been exploited for construction lumber, furniture manufacture, and carving canoes. These include mahogany, cedar, habín, bohóm, and zapote. The bark of a small tree, known as chukúm, was used for tanning leather. Many trees and smaller plants have medicinal properties, and were widely used since prehispanic times. The region also has numerous native fruit-bearing trees and bushes, which were likely grown in many of the solares of Chunchucmil, including zapote, anona, mamey, guaya, saramuyo, pitaya, papaya, nance, and cocoyol. Finally, the forest and the coastal mangroves were a major source of charcoal and firewood for cooking.

Faunal Resources

Marine Fauna

Several sixteenth-century towns in the vicinity of the ruins of Chunchucmil, such as Tzemé, Hunucmá, Tetíz, Chochola, and Oxcúm, paid tribute to the Spaniards in the form of fish (Roys 1957:30–33). This was also true of many other towns near the north and west coasts of Yucatán. It was also most likely true for the east coast as well, but we do not have tribute data for that region. Fisherfolk would salt or smoke the fish, so it would last several days after leaving the coast. The practice of coastal communities supplying the interior with fish was likely widespread in prehispanic times, and there is some archaeological evidence to support it. Very small amounts of edible marine fishbones have been reported from Dzibilchaltún, Mayapán, and Chichén Itzá, despite research methodologies that did not specifically aim to recover such fragile remains. The small quantities of fish bones found at sites in the interior may be the result of culturally specific butchery practices. Even today, fishermen clean and fillet fish while they are sailing back to port, removing the head so that only vertebrae would be present in the archaeological record of inland sites. Masson has argued that catfish (but not other species of fish) may have been preserved for export at the Terminal Classic site of Northern River Lagoon, in Belize (Masson 2004:114). In a robust sample of marine fauna, catfish cranial remains were abundant while vertebrae were present in extremely low numbers. Given the evidence for salt production at Northern River Lagoon, Masson argues catfish were prepared for trade to inland sites via cleaning and salting (Masson 2004:115). A similar differential of skeletal elements in the sample of fish remains from Isla Cerritos in Yucatán has been argued to indicate processing for inland trade (Carr 1989:8). Unfortunately the preservation of bone is so poor at Chunchucmil that very little faunal material was recovered and it is unlikely that small fish bones would survive in a midden context here.

Similar butchering practices continue today in Yucatán, where conch fishermen extract the shellfish from the shell, cut off the foot, and throw both foot and shell overboard. Similar preparation techniques are true as well for sea turtles, which are butchered on a nearby beach, and only the meat and some of the major bones are carted away. The remains of marine mammals, such as dolphins, tropical seals (Monachus tropicalis, now extinct), and manatees, have been reported from coastal sites, but not at communities in the interior (Götz 2012). While fish and turtle bones do commonly appear at coastal sites, transporting these resources to inland communities, even in dried or smoked form, was highly variable throughout the northern Maya lowlands and may have been an inefficient use of such resources. The end result is that fishing or hunting marine fauna leaves little trace in the archaeological record at inland sites. One further complication is the potential to consume vertebrae as part of stews made of dried fish, although such recipes are not known today within Yucatecan culinary traditions. Perhaps most telling is that stable isotope data show that diets of coastal populations during the Classic period were much more diverse than those of people who lived inland (Mansell et al. 2006). Artifacts made from marine fauna are found at sites across the Maya lowlands, such as jewelry made from a variety of species of shell, fish and shark vertebrae, and shark teeth. Stingray spines, used in bloodletting rituals, are also quite common. Since Chunchucmil was very close to the Gulf Coast, it was most likely a major supplier of marine products to communities in the interior of northwest Yucatán.

Apiculture

During the Postclassic and contact periods, northwest Yucatán was considered part of the Ah Canul province (still a common surname in Chunchucmil and nearby San Mateo). Records indicate that one of the major products for the Ah Canul province was honey (Roys 1957; Piña Chan 1978). The prehispanic bees native to Yucatán (Melipona beecheii) were stingless but produced a thin, slightly sweet honey and of course beeswax. This honey was used for medicinal purposes and in balche, the native fermented beverage. Maya beehives are often in hollow logs capped with removable stone disks at each end. At Cozumel these stone disks have been found in Postclassic archaeological contexts, and at Nakum in Early Classic contexts, but to date they have not been found in large numbers within urban Chunchucmil (Źrałka et al. 2014). Today Maya beekeepers prefer to place their apiaries within the seasonal wetlands on small natural and artificial rises (including ancient house mounds), where the bees have access to fresh water and pollinating flowers for most, if not all of the year. This has obvious implications for the discovery of beehive artifacts.

These apiaries are almost all located within close proximity to natural drains or artificial wells piercing the thin laja (bedrock) that caps the underground aquifer, providing a steady source of water for the bees to drink. During dry spells, beekeepers will fill small basins (similar in shape and size to the basin-shaped metates of the Chunchucmil region) with enough water to last until the rains return. Some ancient metates have been reused for this purpose by contemporary Maya people. Ancient Chunchucmil’s proximity to vast wetlands blooming with flowers and fresh water for most of the year would have provided the same ideal conditions that they do today for the villagers of Chunchucmil and San Mateo. It is reasonable to suspect that the ancient Maya of the Chunchucmil region had as great a bounty of honey extracted from their wetland apiaries as is recorded for their counterparts of more recent periods.

Early colonial Spaniards had more interest in beeswax than in honey. Tribute payments were made in beeswax from the western part of the Yucatán Peninsula, where the beeswax was yellow and considered of higher quality than the black beeswax from the eastern peninsula (Patch 2003). In addition to its use as a sealant and source of light, beeswax was in demand during the Postclassic period when lost-wax metallurgy spread into Yucatán via Mayapán. Demand during the Early Classic period is less certain.

Other Faunal Resources

The coastal regions of northwest Yucatán have a large inventory of terrestrial mammals and rodents that have traditionally been hunted in recent and past times for their meat and skins. These include deer, wild pig, peccary, jaguar, puma, ocelot, margay, fox, coatimundi, raccoon, anteater, rabbit, paca, opossum, and smaller mammals and rodents. The coastal and near-coastal regions also have a vast number of species of birds, many of which have been traditionally hunted for their meat and feathers. The estuaries directly west along the coast from Chunchucmil are one of the largest annual mating and nesting habitats for the pink flamingo (Phoenicopterus ruber) and the fourth-most-important wintering ground for over 13 duck species. Reptiles from the region include crocodile, turtles, iguanas, and snakes. In sum, the people of Chunchucmil had ample sources of protein beyond marine fauna.

Conclusion

The perishable goods presented in this chapter are diverse in many ways. Some goods, such as salt, achiote, and dyes have a higher value per unit of weight than other goods, such as cordage or roofing thatch. Bulkier goods were unlikely to have been traded very far. Some of the items that we believe the people of Chunchucmil produced for export were available elsewhere in Mesoamerica. However, when and where the quality of items coming from further away is best (or better), such non-local versions may be more highly valued and more marketable than those of inferior quality produced closer to the consumer. At the same time, there are gradients in availability. Looking at these gradients gives us some idea of the direction that goods produced at Chunchucmil may have traveled. For example, cordage and roofing thatch can be obtained quite broadly across the Maya lowlands yet they are more abundant in Gulf Coast wetlands. This suggests that rather than trading these goods along the coast, the people of Chunchucmil probably shipped them inland, though probably not more than 100 km, given their bulkiness and the lack of beasts of burden. Since salt is available along the coast to the north and east, the people of Chunchucmil likely shipped large portions of salt along the coast to the south where it would have eventually gone inland to the large population centers of the southern lowlands.

We admit that the manufacture on a commercial scale of highly valued but archaeologically ephemeral products at Chunchucmil remains debatable. Although we feel that the argument for Chunchucmil’s specialization and trade in salt is very strong, we admit that the argument for specialization and trade in other products, such as cotton, is less strong. However, the demand throughout Mesoamerica for some of the items discussed in this chapter seems salient in light of the fact that the Chunchucmil Economic Region afforded easy access to all the necessary ingredients and in light of the fact that many lines of evidence suggest that Chunchucmil was a specialized trade center. In the next chapter, we review these lines of evidence in detail.