The Maya used so much red paint that they poisoned their water with mercury, mud sediments reveal
The Maya used so much red paint that they accidentally poisoned their lakes and waterways with mercury, a new study finds.
Key points
- But the Maya passion for the color red — which to them represented the sun, blood and life — caused an environmental disaster when the nearby waters were poisoned by the cinnabar runoff, said study first author Matthew Waters, a paleolimnologist (a scientist who studies ancient waterways) at Auburn University in Alabama.
- The problem was cinnabar, a vivid-red mercury-sulfide mineral that can be used as the pigment vermilion in red paint.
- Cinnabar was a common pigment in the paint they made, along with red ocher, which gets its color from a nontoxic iron mineral called hematite.
To investigate, Waters and his colleagues studied mercury levels in Maya-era mud in the Yucatán, and found overwhelming signs of mercury poisoning, probably from cinnabar paint, they reported in their study, published Nov.
Additional details
- Troubled waters The study found extreme levels of mercury in sediment cores from two Maya-era sites: Cobá Lake, a shallow lake beside the Maya city of that name, and Cenote Xcach (also spelled X-Canché), a flooded sinkhole beside a ruined city in the jungle that few have excavated.
- has determined it is unsafe to drink water with mercury levels above 2 parts per billion, while the official limit for the level of mercury in fish, where it builds up over time, is 1 part per million — any number above that means the fish can be seized by authorities.
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- Severe poisoning occurs when the mercury levels in human blood exceed about 100 parts per billion, from drinking contaminated water or eating contaminated marine animals, such as fish.
- The reddish hue of the Maya sun god Kinich Ahau, made between the sixth and ninth centuries, now housed in Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology, shows the Maya's love for mercury.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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