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The Ancient Maya Used Mercury for Paint—and Poisoned Entire Lakes for Centuries

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The Ancient Maya Used Mercury for Paint—and Poisoned Entire Lakes for Centuries

During the height of the Maya civilization, two lakes in Mexico had staggeringly high mercury levels.

In a study published earlier this month in the journal Science Advances, researchers extracted sediment cores from Cenote Xcach and Lago Coba, two lakes in the Mexican part of the Yucatan. What they found was so surprising that at first they thought they’d made a mistake—for centuries during the Maya Classic period (250 CE to 900 CE), the mercury levels in both lakes were significantly higher than modern mercury toxicity thresholds. The team, which is mostly made up of non-archaeologists, hopes their results will provide new insight into Ancient Maya archaeology.

Today, Maya are an Indigenous people of Mesoamerica who descend from the ancient Maya, one of the most advanced civilizations of the Americas. The ancient Maya thrived in Mesoamerica from approximately 1000 BCE to 1500 CE and built monumental architecture, including the famous Chichen Itza Pyramid. The fact that they used mercury is nothing new, study co-author Matthew Waters, a paleolimnologist at Auburn University who studies ancient toxic algal blooms, told Gizmodo. But it hadn’t been documented as much in the Yucatan Peninsula.

In fact, mercury “was not even on our radar to look for,” he said. But paleolimnologists study the history of lakes, “so I go back in time, and when you go back in time, anything can happen. ” The team pulled cores from four lakes in total but only found mercury in Cenote Xcach and Lago Coba.



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