A team of archaeologists from ̽̽, University of New Hampshire, and others have discovered a large-scale pre-Columbian fish-trapping facility. Located in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, the largest inland wetland in Belize, the team dated the construction of these fisheries canals to the Late Archaic period (2000-1900 BCE), pre-dating Amazonian examples by a thousand years or more.
“It seems likely that the canals allowed for annual fish harvests and social gatherings, which would have encouraged people to return to this area year after year and congregate for longer periods of time,” said Marieka Brouwer Burg, professor of anthropology at ̽̽ and co-director of the .
“Such intensive investments in the landscape may have led ultimately to the development of the complex society characteristic of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization,” Brouwer Burg said, “which subsequently occurred in this area by around 1200 BCE.”
The network of canals was designed to channel annual flood waters into ponds for fish trapping, said Eleanor Harrison-Buck, professor of anthropology at the University of New Hampshire, director of the BREA project, and lead author on the new study. “[The fisheries] would have yielded enough fish to feed as many as 15,000 people year-round, conservatively,” Harrison-Buck said. “The dates indicate that the fisheries were initially constructed by Late Archaic hunter-gatherer-fishers and continued to be used by their Formative Maya descendants (approximately 2000 BCE to 200 CE). 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.”
Published in the journal Science Advances, used 26 radiocarbon dates from test excavation sites in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, which indicate that such landscape-scale wetland enhancements may have been an adaptive response to long-term climate disturbance recorded in Mesoamerica between 2200 and 1900 BCE.
“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,” said Harrison-Buck. “However, after running numerous radiocarbon dates, it became clear they were built much earlier.”
Wetland resilience
Sediment samples were collected along the walls of the excavation units and sequenced for specific elements, such as nitrogen and carbon, to look for environmental changes over time. The sediment showed a strong tropical forest dominance during that period and no evidence of crop cultivation, specifically maize. Along with a lack of any pollen from domesticated crops, there were not any signs of ditched and drained agricultural fields in the immediate area dating to that time. The data gathered suggests the distinctive long linear zigzag channels served primarily as large-scale fish-trapping facilities.
“Wetlands have always been a critical ecosystem for humans across the globe,” said Samantha Krause, a co-author on the new study and professor at Texas State University. “Knowing how to manage wetland resources responsibly is essential for the continued resilience of these ecosystems both in the past and today. The Archaic hunter-gatherer-fishers knew how to protect their resources and use them in a way that could sustain these habitats, not exhaust them, which explains their long-lasting occupation in this area.”
With the support of the local community, the team plans to return to Crooked Tree to investigate a larger sample of these landscape-scale modifications that they have identified across a broad area of northern Belize, hoping to more fully understand the complexity of human-wetland interactions in the past.
̽̽ anthropologist Katie Bailey was a co-author on the new study, providing expertise on pollen analysis. Other co-authors include Mark Willis, department of archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia; and Angelina Perrotti, Palynology & Environmental Archaeology Research Lab; Monona, Wisconsin.