Aerial scans of the Yucatan Peninsula in South America have uncovered a gigantic 4,000-year-old fishery in Belize, which is the largest inland wetland in the region and a significant archaeological discovery.
The findings, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, revealed that the site is 42 square kilometres (16 square miles) in size and has a complex system of man-made canals and ponds that zigzag. According to researchers, this enormous system functioned as an intricate fish trap, demonstrating how cutting-edge engineering methods were applied to modify the environment for sustainable fishing.
“The network of canals was designed to channel annual flood waters into source ponds for fish trapping and would have yielded enough fish to feed as many as 15,000 people year-round, conservatively,” says Harrison-Buck, professor of anthropology and director of the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project.
“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 civilisation, but this study tells us that it wasn’t just agriculture-it was also potential mass harvesting of aquatic species.”
The research used 26 radiocarbon dates from test excavation sites in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary (CTWS), the largest inland wetland in Belize, 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 centres,” said Harrison-Buck. “However, after running numerous radiocarbon dates, it became clear they were built much earlier.”
