This chapter considers one of the crudest types of pottery ever produced by the ancient Maya, Coconut Walk Plain, a ware that has been interpreted to have been used in evaporative salt production along coastal lagoons and on Ambergris Caye in Belize. A series of similar types, including Rio Juan Unslipped, spans the Preclassic to the Postclassic periods, linking the long-lived salt trade to coastal communities such as Marco Gonzalez. The authors use recent advances in ceramic petrography to identify an imported temper in these poorly made wares that seems counterintuitive for an expedient pottery vessel. Their research suggests that coastal communities considered the entire bay area as a local resource procurement zone because canoe transport was readily available to procure distant resources.
Recent Investigations on Ambergris Caye, Belize