Earliest Fishing Operation Found in Central America, Dating to 2,000 BC

Even before the rise of the great Maya civilization, the people who occupied Central America’s Yucatan Peninsula were applying their engineering skills to make the land more productive and liveable. This was made crystal clear by a recent discovery by a team of archaeologists and anthropologists, who discovered the most ancient fish-trapping operation ever identified anywhere in the region inside Belize’s largest inland wetland.

Examining imagery collected by drones and Google Earth, the researchers from the Belize River East Archaeology (BREA) project were fascinated by an interconnected network of zigzag lines they saw running through the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary.