On the eve of the rise of the Maya civilization, people living in what’s now Belize turned a whole wetland into a giant network of fish traps big enough to feed thousands of people.

We already know that the Maya turned swamps into breadbaskets by draining and building raised blocks of land for maize fields. However, a recent survey of a wetland in what’s now Belize suggests that the rise of the Maya civilization was fueled not just by maize but by tons of fish every year. University of New Hampshire archaeologist Eleanor Harrison-Buck and her colleagues recently mapped a network of channels and ponds for trapping fish, built just before the Maya civilization rose to prominence.

Fish in a barrel

Harrison-Buck and her fellow archeologists used drones and Google Earth data to map 108 kilometers of ancient channels that zigzag across 42 square kilometers of wetland in Belize’s Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. The result is a network of channels and ponds that looks remarkably like the fish traps found farther south in Bolivia, built several centuries after the ones at Crooked Tree. Radiocarbon dating of material buried in the bottom of one channel suggests that the network has been around for at least 4,000 years.

Read full article

Comments

Twelve-thousand years ago, people in a coastal village in the Levant used stone weights on their spindles to spin thread faster and more evenly—and, some archeologists are arguing, in the process they pioneered the basic mechanics that eventually made cart wheels possible.

Archaeologists found hundreds of perforated, roundish, flattish pebbles in the 12,000-year-old village of Nahal Ein-Gev II, all with neat holes drilled in their centers. Based on their uneven appearance and their varied sizes, it seemed that these weren’t beads, but spindle whorls: a flywheel-like piece that makes a drop spindle spin faster and more steadily. The find is the oldest known evidence of a newfangled textile production technology called the drop spindle. But it may also have been a distant precursor to the wheel. According to archaeologists Talia Yashuv and Leore Grosman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, drop spindles work on the same mechanical principle as the earliest wheels, which show up on carts around 6,000 years ago during the Bronze Age.

“Circular objects with a hollowed center connected to a bar make one of the most important inventions of all time,” write Yashuv and Grosman in their recent paper. “At the core of it all, the importance of the wheel and axle lies in a relatively simple rotational mechanism capable of transforming linear to rotary motion and vice versa.”

Read full article

Comments