Maya Travel and Transport

Maya travel linked communities across southern Mexico and Central America by footpaths, raised roads, rivers, lakes and sea. Maya peoples continue to live across these regions today; the evidence discussed here ranges from a seventh-century mural at Calakmul to colonial accounts written after the Spanish arrival. The physical demands differed by landscape: highland obsidian sources connected with lowland settlements, while coastal and river canoes moved loads that would have taken many people to carry on land.

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Loads moved on people’s backs

In the northern Maya lowlands, murals at Chiik Nahb in Calakmul, in present-day Campeche, Mexico, show how people handled goods within a city. The painted scenes date to about 620–700 CE. They show people presenting, receiving, preparing and eating food, while carriers transport large pots and rope-tied bundles with a tumpline, a strap passed over the forehead to support a load. One painted caption identifies maize gruel; others name maize grain, tamales, salt, tobacco and clay vessels. The scenes show carriers moving both raw and prepared goods within a city.

Longer journeys joined unlike regions. The Guatemalan Highlands are a mountainous region with several obsidian sources. Obsidian is volcanic glass used to make cutting tools. Maya obsidian came from sources including San Martín Jilotepeque, El Chayal and Ixtepeque. The mix found in lowland sites changed over time: San Martín Jilotepeque was prominent before 250 CE, El Chayal during the Classic period (roughly 250–900 CE), and Ixtepeque at some sites after about 800 CE. By the ninth and tenth centuries, merchants between Chichen Itza and a Gulf Coast port carried shell, obsidian and finished ornaments inland on their backs and exchanged them for salt from northern Yucatan’s salt beds.

Land journeys also used prepared routes. In northern Yucatan, Coba’s causeway network included a roughly 100-kilometre sacbe, or raised road, linking Coba and Yaxuna. People still had to walk to such routes and carry or relay the goods they moved. When a waterway could take the load, it spared carriers from bearing the entire distance on foot.

Travel between courts

In eastern Petén, valleys and plateaus provided north–south routes across Guatemala’s Maya Mountains. The San Juan River valley led north toward the Petexbatun region, while the Dolores Plateau and Sacul River valley ran south toward cacao-growing country. In their reading of an inscription dated 796 at Ixkun, Nicholas Carter and colleagues suggest Aj Cha may have been a prince sent to Tikal for upbringing and education, possibly as part of an alliance. The same study recounts raids and captures in the region in 779–780, showing that political journeys included both alliance-making and war.

Rivers and seasonal wetlands

In the southern lowlands, rivers and seasonal wetlands offered routes for canoes. A bajo is a low-lying area that becomes swampy when flooded. In the Petén of northern Guatemala, bajos and rivers changed with the rains: the bajos held water during the wet season and hardened into firm ground in the dry season, while rivers swelled in the rains and shrank to trickles in the dry months. Canoes could pass through connected rivers and flooded bajos during the rains; in the dry season, travelers could cross firm bajos on foot, while reduced rivers offered less help to water traffic.

Researchers have proposed that a route from the Hondo River through the Holmul River and Bajo de Santa Fe carried food toward Tikal during the Late Classic period. Where waterways did not connect directly, portage meant carrying cargo overland between them. Canoes then moved bulk goods such as dried maize along navigable stretches. Another proposed route joined the Belize and Usumacinta Rivers through southeastern Petén; Late Classic pottery found along it supports movement between the two river systems.

Coastal production also depended on inland transport. At Punta Ycacos Lagoon on Belize’s southern coast, archaeologists documented 41 saltworks dating to 600–900 CE. A wooden paddle from the salt-working settlement of K’ak’ Naab’ links that coastal production with canoe travel. Heather McKillop’s study connects the paddle and saltworks to river transport toward the inland Petén, where salt was scarce. Canoe crews could move a heavier cargo along water than an individual carrier could bear, then transfer goods to people who continued the journey inland.

Coastal canoes and sea travel

Maya dugout canoes were made by hollowing a single durable, buoyant tree trunk and using paddles to propel and steer the craft. Coastal crews needed to read currents, tides and weather, and recognize reef entrances and channels leading into lagoons. Sheltered coves and lagoon mouths offered places to land or wait when weather worsened. The demands of a sea crossing therefore included choosing a safe route and landing place, not simply moving a canoe across open water.

During the Postclassic period, after about 900 CE, coastal trade around the Yucatán Peninsula connected the Gulf coast with the Caribbean shore as far south as Honduras. Canoe legs joined river passages and land transfers, moving coastal products such as salt, dried fish and shells toward inland settlements and bringing obsidian, stone, feathers, cotton cloth, honey and wax toward the coast. Polé, at present-day Xcaret, served journeys to and from Cozumel, where pilgrims visited the sanctuary of the Maya goddess Ixchel. It functioned as a passenger port as well as a place of exchange.

An account of Columbus’s 1502 encounter off Honduras describes a large ocean-going canoe, possibly a Maya trading vessel, carrying passengers and cargo including copper, woven cotton and honey. The episode belongs to the first years of Spanish contact and records a canoe moving people and goods along the Caribbean coast.

Walking and hospitality after conquest

Diego de Landa’s 1566 account describes Yucatán after the Spanish arrival. He calls people the region’s “mules and oxen,” a concise description of how human carriers bore goods overland. In another passage he reports that a household gave food or drink to visitors, seeking supplies from neighbors if necessary. Landa also writes that a group traveling along a road was offered provisions by people it met.