A hen’s-eye-view of South America’s Yucatán Peninsula has revealed an enormous 4,000-year-old fishery in Belize’s largest inland wetland.
The lengthy, zigzagging community of human-made canals and ponds re-engineers the watery panorama into what some researchers describe as an enormous fish lure, overlaying 42 sq. kilometers (16 sq. miles) in whole.
Excavations on the bottom have offered a number of radiocarbon dates for the channels, which recommend they have been in use from about 2000 BCE till 200 CE.
Belize is the house of the earliest Maya settlements, however these fish traps have been constructed no less than 700 years earlier than this civilization’s rise to prominence within the area.
“The early dates for the canals surprised us initially because we all assumed these massive constructions were built by the ancient Maya living in the nearby city centers,” says anthropologist Eleanor Harrison-Buck from the College of New Hampshire.
“However, after running numerous radiocarbon dates, it became clear they were built much earlier.”
Harrison-Buck and her colleagues engaged on the Belize River East Archaeology undertaking argue these channels are a part of the primary large-scale prehistoric fish-trapping facility recorded in Central America.
They have been most likely constructed by Late Archaic hunter-gatherer-fisher teams, presumably as a response to long-term drought. Researchers estimate the traps as soon as caught sufficient fish to feed 15,000 individuals for a complete yr.
If true, this helps rising proof that implies the Maya civilization was initially constructed on a feast of fishes, not essentially a surplus of maize, as different scientists have hypothesized.
“For Mesoamerica in general, we tend to regard agricultural production as the engine of civilization, but this study tells us that it wasn’t just agriculture — it was also potential mass harvesting of aquatic species,” explains Harrison-Buck.
Like different researchers engaged on the Yucatán, Harrison-Buck’s staff has just lately began utilizing aerial surveys to look by dense vegetation or hard-to-access areas. Their focus is on the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary (CTWS), which has hosted practically 10,000 years of steady human occupation, together with a number of different places within the Maya Lowlands, together with the New River, Rio Hondo, and the Candelaria.
When lagoons in these aquatic environments dry out, the shore hosts marshy grasslands, and the delicate earthen channels constructed into the clay-rich soil are “barely discernible”, researchers say. Some are solely 20 centimeters (8 inches) deep.
With drone footage and Google Earth satellite tv for pc imagery, nevertheless, the sample is extra simply noticed.
Satellite tv for pc imagery contains (A) a recent fishery in Zambia, Africa; (B) an historical fishery within the Bolivian Amazon; and (C) the traditional fishery within the Western Lagoon, CTWS, Belize (all pictures courtesy of Google Earth). (Harrison-Buck et al., Science Advances, 2024)
Earlier research have interpreted these channels as dams or water catchments for wetland agriculture. However scientists have discovered no pollen from maize crops, nor any agricultural fields with ditches or drains at these websites.
The waterways are paying homage to pre-Columbian fish-traps constructed to the south, within the Bolivian Amazon.
Annually, in the course of the moist season, flood cycles inundate Belize’s wetlands and lagoons, offering a superb place for fish to spawn. Throughout the dry season, nevertheless, these human-built channels divert receding waters into swimming pools, dragging aquatic life right into a confined house.
To this present day, locals say these ponds nonetheless focus fish when flood waters subside. As a result of a lot of the area is protected against harvesting, nevertheless, most fish are left to rot because the swimming pools slowly evaporate.
Some scientists hypothesize that an abundance of storable meals is what first led hunter-gatherer societies to type settlements round vital assets.
Drying, salting, and smoking an estimated million kilograms of fish every year would have simply supported a big, sedentary society residing in and across the CTWS, argue Harrison-Buck and colleagues.
“Further investigations are necessary to clarify this full history,” they conclude.
The research was printed in Science Advances.
