FAMSI © 2004 - Eduardo Williams - The Ethnoarchaeology of Salt Production in the Lake Cuitzeo Basin, Michoacan, Mexico

FAMSI © 2004:
Eduardo Williams

The Ethnoarchaeology of Salt Production in the Lake Cuitzeo Basin, Michoacán, México

Figure 5b. Pottery fragments found during the 2003 field season. They may have been used in ancient times to store or transport water and brine.

Implications for Archaeology

In the Lake Cuitzeo Basin during Prehispanic times salt, together with many other strategic resources (among others, obsidian, chalcedony, cinnabar, kaolin, rhyolite and opal [Cárdenas 1999]), played an important role in the economic, political and cultural relations between the local inhabitants of the area and its hinterland. The ancient salt-making sites in the area, however, are still undiscovered and undescribed.

Figure 6. Shallow pools, like the ones excavated in the bedrock near Chucándiro, at the western tip of Lake Cuitzeo, may have been used in Prehispanic or Colonial times for the solar evaporation of brine.

To identify archaeological sites that represent ancient salt-making localities, it is important to understand the processes involved in this activity, as well as to know the material remains or traces that these processes leave on the landscape, since salt itself is usually not preserved in the archaeological record. Prehispanic saltworks performed basically the same functions with similar tools as the ones we see in the area today, with stone, wood, clay, and fibers instead of plastic, metal, and other modern materials. The features and artifacts linked with salt production that we would expect to find in an archaeological situation (Table 1) would be the following: floors used in the preparation and mixing of the soils, filters (pits?), vessels for storing water and brine, and for transporting them within the site (Figure 5b); areas for storing earth; elements for water evaporation (e.g. shallow pools) (Figure 6, shown above), great mounds of discarded earth (Figure 7, shown below), and lastly, "fossilized" canals (Figure 8, shown below) (see also Parsons 1996).

Figure 7. This mound of leached soil, locally known as a terrero, results from the accumulation of discarded earth after each salt-making operation.

Figure 8. This canal is used to take water from the springs to the fincas. The water's high mineral content has "fossilized" this feature.

Table 1. Summary of Salt-making Activities and their Possible Archaeological Correlates in the Lake Cuitzeo Basin, Michoacán (compare with Parsons 1996: Table 2).
Activity	Modern Tool or Feature	Ancient Tool or Feature	Archaeological Correlates
Leaching brine	Estiladera	Pits or filtering devices of undetermined nature	Pits; stone alignments; concentrations of leached soil (mounds or terreros)
Water/brine transportation	Buckets	Clay pots	Potsherds; whole pots of a particular type
Solar evaporation of brine	Canoas, shallow pools	Shallow pools	Stone alignments, lime-coated flat surfaces; masses of large, shallow ceramic vessels
Carrying the salt from the canoa	Baskets	Baskets	Textile fragments (preserved by salt)
Moving salitre from the lake bed to the estiladera	Big sacks	Textile bags or sacks	Textile fragments (preserved by salt)
Scratching the surface of the earth; digging or cutting of salitre crust	Shovels	Stone artifacts such as obsidian knives or scrapers	Stone tools with worn surfaces, possibly with salt incrustations
Transportation and storage of crystallized salt	Textile or basketry containers (i.e. sacks, baskets)	Pottery vessels (mass-produced, therefore of low quality)	Potsherds or whole vessels of a "disposable" kind
Temporary residence near salt-making sites	Huts made of branches, thatch, etc.	Houses, workshops, storage facilities	Stone alignments, foundations, domestic refuse concentrations (i.e. lithics, pottery, bone, etc.)

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