Salt and Plumbate: Late Classic Multi-crafting in Eastern Soconusco, Chiapas, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological mounds within the mangrove zone west of the Rio Cahuacan, in far-southern Chiapas, Mexico, have dense surface remains of broken Plumbate pottery, solid ceramic cylinders, and various other kinds of pyro-technological evidence. Clays from the region match Tohil Plumbate chemical composition, thus solidifying the inference that the mounds are Tohil Plumbate production centers. But if so, the Plumbate potters must have been poor ceramic artisans who broke huge numbers of vessels during production. Alternatively, Plumbate may have been made to be used on site. With a history of salt production stretching back to Early Formative times, one possibility is that Plumbate vessels were used for brine boiling in the production of salt. I discuss this possibility in the light of both earlier and later salt-production assemblages of the Eastern Soconusco mangrove zone. I conclude that a multi-crafting perspective provides the best fit to archaeological evidence recovered from these sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35730.0