Environmental Legacy of Precolumbian Maya Mercury: Using the Present to Understand the Past

Summary

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Mexico and Central American region has a history of mercury use that began at least two millennia before European colonization in the sixteenth century. Archaeologists have reported deposits of cinnabar (HgS) and other mercury materials at Classic period (ca. 250–900 CE) Maya settlements across the region; however, there has been little consideration of the environmental legacy of this long history of anthropogenic mercury use. This paper presents a new analysis of the archaeology and environmental legacy of mercury use by the Precolumbian Maya. We combine all previous archaeological and geochemical data on mercury from the Maya lowlands with new total Hg determinations on archived soil and sediment samples from Maya archaeological projects undertaken since the 1980s. Most Maya settlements in this study have at least one context where total mercury concentrations equal or exceed modern benchmarks for environmental toxicity. We demonstrate how pairing legacy mercury data with archaeological records from Maya sites advances our understanding of how, where, and when the Maya used mercury.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• 2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37693.0