Fwd: [Aztlan] Bajos and Sailing (From Ron Canter)

[Dave Pentecost]

(sorry, I sent this only to Matt at first, not the whole list)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dave Pentecost <dave.pentecost at gmail.com>
Date: Sep 26, 2006 12:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Aztlan] Bajos and Sailing (From Ron Canter)
To: "mmoriar at tulane.edu" <mmoriar at tulane.edu>


Listeros

As some of you may know, Ron Canter has a deep interest in Maya
navigation. I've been keeping him informed on this discussion, and he
recently sent me his thoughts, with permission to post them here.

Dave Pentecost


FROM RON:

      This is all good stuff.  I've got to get Rice's paper on canals
connecting L. Peten Itza to nearby lakes - I would guess Lakes Salpeten and
Macanche.   Canals between the east-west lake chain could extend the length
of a continuous canoe route through Peten Itza to 40 km.
Docks on a canal in the El Mirador basin would confirm that it was used for
transportation.

     The danger is that people will start assuming navigation canals
wherever there are bajos, which can be a risky assumption.  Bajos aren't
all alike.  They all might have had canals, but it seems better to be
careful and look for some 'ground-truth' first.  I also got on Google-earth
yesterday and scanned the west coast of Yucatan.  There are traces of
canals visible behind the coast, but most head for the shore, not parallel
to it.  I couldn't see signs of an 'intracoastal waterway'.  Since the west
coast is sheltered from the Trades, there wouldn't have been much need for
one anyway.
     Some interesting patterns turned up though.  Between Campeche and
Celestun, the coast is banded: mangrove, salt flats, marsh, backswamp, and
dry ground.  In the marsh are prominent round forested islands.  Most have
the trace of a canal either leaving them or running through them.  Not sure
what to make of  it.  In the Ria Celestun, there are traces of canals
visible on the bottom, underwater.
     The east coast has a sheltered route behind reefs and barrier islands
for most of (but not all of) the distance from Isla Contoy to Punta
Herrero, and probably did in the past too.  The north coast could be windy,
a tough slog east.  The 'Thousand Islands' in Parque Natural San Felipe
offer about 30 km of protected channels behind the coast.  Ria Lagartos and
Laguna Conil [Yalahan] have even longer channels behind the coast, but how
much of those were useable in the Classic is not clear.  They gradually
shoal out as they trend east.  Ria Lagartos has a good short haulover back
to the Gulf at El Cuyo but Laguna Conil ends in mangroves.
     In the Classic, sea level was a meter lower, so the west coast
backswamps and marshes would have been drier, maybe even farmland.  The
shallow lagoons we see around Sisal may not have been there in the past.
The Ria Lagartos and Laguna Conil may have been much shorter.  One meter
doesn't sound like much but it can be.  If sea level rose one meter,
Bangladesh would lose some of its best rice growing lands and lose the
Sunderban, the second largest mangrove swamp in the world.  In all, 25,000
km2 would be inundated at high tide, more than 17.5% of the entire country
of Bangladesh.

I should read Epstein's before I comment.  I remain skeptical of Maya
sailors, but maybe he has turned up some newer material that I'm unaware
of.

Ron Canter




On 9/25/06, mmoriar at tulane.edu <mmoriar at tulane.edu> wrote:
> Dear Dave G,
>
> There are some interesting discussions of ancient Maya canoes and navigation out
> there.  Both Eric Thompson and Norman Hammond have published pretty detailed
> syntheses on the topic.  Jeremiah Epstein has also published a nice
> reevaluation of Thompson's data on sailing.  I've attached some refs at the
> bottom.
>
> More directly related to your question, Héctor Mejía gave a paper at this
> summer's Guatemalan Simposio that presented data from some of the new sites in
> the Mirador Basin.  Although I don't remember the details very well, several of
> the sites have possible canals running out of the bajos, and at least one of
> these canals has a possible docking area.  You might also check out some of the
> hydraulic features at Edzna and Calakmul.
>
> If some of these bajos were lakes, then I think it's very likely that they would
> have been used for canoe travel.  As a possible analogy, canoes were the major
> mode of transportation in the Lake Petén Itzá basin.  Contact period accounts
> include some nice descriptions of Itzá canoes and describe at least one
> settlement as a "port."  Don Rice has also identified ancient Maya port
> features at the sites of Nixtún Ch'ich' and Ixlú, and my colleagues and I have
> excavated a little harbor at the site of Trinidad de Nosotros.  Rice has also
> identified two definite and several possible inter-lacustrine canals that may
> have been used to facilitate canoe traffic between Lake Petén Itzá and some of
> the smaller lakes nearby.  In short, canoe travel seems to have been very
> important in and around Lake Petén Itzá.
>
> Cheers,
> Matt Moriarty
>
>
> Epstein, Jeremiah F.
> 1990 Sails in Aboriginal Mesoamerica: Reevaluating Thompson's Argument. American
> Anthropologist 92(1):187-192.
>
> Hammond, Norman
> 1981 Classic Maya Canoes.  The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and
> Underwater Exploration 10(3):173-185.
>
> Rice, Don S.
> 1996 Hydraulic Engineering in the Central Peten, Guatemala: Ports and
> Inter-lacustrine Canals.  In Arqueología Mesoamericana: Homenaje a William T.
> Sanders, Volume II, edited by A. Guadalupe M., J.R. Parsons, R.S. Santley, and
> M.C. Serra P., pp. 109-122.  Mexico, D.F.: INAH.
>
> Thompson, J. Eric S.
> 1951 Canoes and Navigation of the Maya and Their Neighbors.  The Journal of the
> Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 79(1/2,
> 1949):69-78.
>
>
>
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-- 
The Daily Glyph http://www.gomaya.com/glyph
Usumacinta         http://www.gomaya.com/dams
Cell  917 312 9733