Economy and trade of the Ancient Maya: Perishable trade

Figure 1: Location of Salt sources within the Maya region

Perishable Trade

Salt Trade
     In reference to the salt trade of the Ancient Maya not much is known. Considering that salt is a perishable resource there is little to no evidence of it in the archaeological record. Most of the research that has been conducted on perishable trade items such as salt have come from ethnographic research as well as Isotopic analysis (Thornton 2011). 
     Even though the archaeological evidence does not provide much information about the trade of salt within the Maya region, salt is a necessary commodity for human beings, and so it can be inferred that it was indeed traded during the time of the Ancient Maya (McKillop 2002). Without any environmental factors influencing a persons body, a human body needs between "1 to 2 grams" of salt everyday to survive. Throw in environmental factors of a temperate climate and that jumps to "4 to 6 grams" every day and "8 to 10 grams" if a person is working in a tropical climate, like the Ancient Maya would have been. Based on these numbers the quantity of salt that the Maya would have had to obtain each year would be extreme. 
     Salt sources have been found along the Pacific coast of the Maya region, along with sites in the Maya highlands and the North Yucatan coast. The city-states located in any of those geographic areas would have zero difficulty obtaining salt. However, the Maya lowlands were a different story. The Maya lowlands did not have any nearby, large quantity, resources of salt in which to supply their estimated five million population. If a person in the Maya lowlands needed to intake 8 to 10 grams a day then the estimated salt consumption would be 40 tons a day and almost 15,000 tons a year. The only salt source which produces this large of a quantity of salt is the North Yucatan coast which in 1603 was recorded to have produced 17,300 tons. Even though archaeologists cannot be sure of the salt production during the time of the Ancient Maya it is hypothesized that this is the only source that could have handled that large of a distribution every year. Figure 10 shows salt sources throughout the Maya region. Note the distance that would have needed to be traveled frequently in order to supply the Maya lowlands with almost 15,000 tons of salt each year. Hence, it is supposed that the salt trade was one of the most important perishable trade items of the Ancient Maya. (Andrew 1979)

Sources:
Andrew, Anthony. (1979) Salt and the Maya: Major Prehispanic Trading Spheres. Interdisplinary Approaches to Maya studies: Margins and Centers of the Classic Maya. Vancouver, Canada:1-14 (arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/110245/1/azu_gn1_a785_n1_1_17_w.pdf)

McKillop, H. (2002) Salt: White Gold of the Ancient Maya. Salt as a Maya Trade Good (1). University Press of Florida.

Thornton, Erin (2011) Reconstructing ancient Maya animal trade through strontium isotope (87Sr/86Sr) analysis, Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 38, Issue 12, Pages 3254-3263, ISSN 0305-4403, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2011.06.035.

Figure Sources:

Figure 1: Andrew, Anthony. (1979) Salt and the Maya: Major Prehispanic Trading Spheres. Interdisplinary Approaches to Maya studies: Margins and Centers of the Classic Maya. Vancouver, Canada: 5 (arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/110245/1/azu_gn1_a785_n1_1_17_w.pdf)