Heather McKillop. Salt: white gold of the ancient Maya.

Parsons, Jeffrey R.

xxii+223 pages, 114 figures, 30 tables. Gainesville (FL): University Press of Florida; 0-8130-2511-7 hardback $55.

McKillop makes a convincing case that during Late Classic times enough salt was being produced, by autonomous, specialised saltmakers in her Punta Ycacas Lagoon study region and along neighbouring sections of the Belize coast, to have supplied the needs of urbanised populations in the adjacent interior lowlands. Prior to this study, most archaeologists had concluded that these needs must have been supplied from workshops in northern Yucatan where large quantities of salt could have been more efficiently produced by solar evaporation.

McKillop successfully located and excavated three previously unknown underwater saltmaking workshops situated up to 315 m from the modern shoreline an d covered by water up to I m deep. These sites add a significant new dimension to the archaeological study of Classic lowland Mayan economy. A fourth, above-ground, site seems to represent a water-side location where the salt content of sea water was increased by leaching masses of saline soil.

The underwater sites, comprising compact layers, up to 10 cm thick, of sherds and charcoal, are clearly places where the brine was boiled and probably formed into hard salt cakes inside batches of poorly made jars separated from one another by ceramic spacers and arranged on cylindrical clay pedestals above wood-fuelled fires in large hearths. A majority of the sherds belong to the jars used for boiling brine. Two other common ceramic types, imported and of better quality, probably functioned as storage containers for water and brine; a third, less common type probably was used in saltmaking rituals.

A key finding of this study is that the ceramic assemblages in the four excavated sites are significantly less diversified and more standardised in size and form than a control sample from a nearby domestic residential site. This is most notable in the case of the dominant type of pottery associated with brine boiling. On this basis, McKillop argues that the contents of the four excavated sites were deposited in specialised saltmaking workshops where groups of specialised saltmakers produced boiling jars and salt in localities unmixed with other activities.

McKillop concludes that the salt needs of expanding Classic populations in the southern Maya lowlands increased to the point where salt from nearby Belize coastal sources became essential as large-scale importation of salt from distant northern sources became increasingly problematic. Rising sea levels may have caused a shift to brine boiling during the Late Classic after the inundation of shoreline salt flats where Early Classic saltmaking may have depended primarily on relatively inefficient solar evaporation techniques. During the Late Classic, Belizean coastal settlements like Wild Cane Cay became trading centres that supplied the neighbouring interior populations with salt and other marine products in exchange for goods manufactured by skilled inland artisans.

This book is an important contribution. It demonstrates how careful surface inspection (in difficult underwater and mangrove swamp localities) can radically alter long-accepted perceptions. It effectively challenges the predominant thinking that regarded long-distance north south trade as the major source of salt for rapidly developing Classic centres in the southern Maya lowlands. It provides compelling evidence for rising sea levels during the Late Classic, and equally compelling evidence that the resulting higher water was compensated for through technological innovation for as long as it was worthwhile to produce salt in the region. Specialised saltmaking along the Belize coast was abandoned only in the face of declining population and declining salt demand during the subsequent Postclassic.

I perceive the following points where additional attention should eventually be focused. 1) The character of Early Classic saltmaking remains uncertain, and so it is difficult to say very much about how the Late Classic system described here originated and developed. 2) The inferred degree of specialisation and socio-political autonomy remains problematic. I am convinced that the four identified localities were devoted exclusively to saltmaking, but I am less persuaded by the available evidence that the saltmakers were themselves independent specialists (whether part-time or full-time), or that they were necessarily organised at a supracommunity level. 3) The author does not look much beyond the Maya area for potentially useful comparative insights into the technology and sociology of traditional saltmaking. 4) The evidence for making salt into hard cakes remains overly dependent on ethnographic analogy. 5) Although McKillop provides reasonable hints of reciprocal exchange between salt-producing and salt-consuming areas, such 'trade' needs to be more explicitly modeled. Does it exclude tribute? Is it believed to correspond to marketplace exchange, or something more appropriate to a command economy?

JEFFREY R. PARSONS

Museum of Anthropology, University of

Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan