New research, conducted in part at Texas State University, has discovered the earliest large-scale pre-Columbian fish-trapping facility recorded in ancient Mesoamerica.
The fisheries canals, located in the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, the largest inland wetland in Belize, was dated by the research team to 2000 to 1900 BCE, predating similar fisheries in the Amazon by a thousand years. The facility continued to be used by the Maya descendants of the original builders for centuries thereafter.
Eleanor Harrison-Buck, Ph.D., a professor of anthropology at the University of New Hampshire, served as lead author on the paper. Samantha M. Krause, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at TXST, served as coauthor. The team’s research, “Late Archaic large-scale fisheries in the wetlands of the pre-Columbian Maya Lowlands,” is published in the journal Science Advances.
