The study of Maya salt has been surprisingly contentious. After some groundbreaking work by Anthony Andrews and Brian Dillon in the late 1970s, archaeologists spent the better part of the next decade debating whether salt was actually an important long-distance commodity or even necessary for human life. The work of Heather McKillop and her students and colleagues in Belize publicized new salt workshops along the Caribbean coast and opened the possibility of regional trade networks nucleated around specific sources.
Completely unaware of what I was getting into, I entered the Maya salt discussion in 2010 through a community archaeology project at the inland site of Salinas de los Nueve Cerros, Guatemala, where salt was produced at an industrial scale on the banks of the Chixoy River for over a millennium before the Classic collapse. Since 2019, this work has expanded into archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic investigations at multiple salt sources in highland Guatemala and Chiapas, most notably Sacapulas, San Mateo Ixtatan, and Ixtapa. In this talk, I’ll summarize my findings to date (including very preliminary results from my second archaeological field season at Ixtapa in July, 2025), focusing on regional trade networks, the role salt production played in elite power, and the ways salt producers have continued to adapt to the major changes brought about by the rise and fall of Classic civilization, the Spanish conquest, independence, the intrusion of global capitalism, and the covid pandemic.