Past and Future Earth: Archaeology and Soil Studies on Ambergris Caye, Belize

Marco Gonzalez is one of a number of Maya sites on Belize’s coast and cayes (coral islands) that exhibit anomalous vegetation and dark-coloured soils. Like Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs), the soils are sought locally for cultivation and are underlain by anthropogenic deposits. Our research is aimed at assessing the role of the anthropogenic deposits in soil formation processes with a view to developing strategies to quantify the long-term environmental impact of human activities today.

An Expedient Pottery Technology and Its Implications for Ancient Maya Trade and Interaction

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.