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The Mayans used so much red paint that they accidentally poisoned their lakes and streams with mercury, a new study suggests.
The problem was cinnabar, a bright red mercury sulfide mineral that can be used as vermilion pigment in red paint. Paint runoff can enter waterways, where anaerobic bacteria transform cinnabar in highly toxic methylmercury present in lake sediments. Over time, methylmercury accumulates at higher levels in the food chain.
The old Mayaa people who lived in what is now southern Mexico and Central America and whose descendants are still around today, painted almost everything red. Archaeologists have discovered countless objects that the Mayans made red, including sculptures, monuments, walls, plazas, pottery, and the dead for ceremonial burials. Cinnabar was a common pigment in the paint they made, along with red. ocherwhich gets its color from a non-toxic iron mineral called hematite.
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But the Mayans’ passion for the color red – which to them represented the sun, blood and life – caused an environmental disaster when nearby waters were poisoned by cinnabar runoff, the study’s first author said. Matthew Waterspaleolimnologist (a scientist who studies ancient waterways) at Auburn University in Alabama.
“They would have seen a strange color change in the water… and a drop in its productivity, like fish for protein,” he told Live Science. The Mayans depended heavily on freshwater fisheriesincluding freshwater shellfish.
Previous studies had already found There was evidence of high levels of mercury in the southern highlands and south-central lowlands of the Maya, but no one had fully examined the levels of this toxic mineral in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
To investigate, Waters and his colleagues studied mercury levels in Mayan-era mud in Yucatán and found clear signs of mercury poisoning, likely due to cinnabar paint, they reported in their study, published Nov. 4 in the journal Scientific advances.
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“We didn’t suspect that (the Mayans) were using it in the quantities that we were seeing,” he said.
Troubled waters
The study found extreme levels of mercury in sediment cores from two Mayan-era sites: Lake Cobá, a shallow lake next to the Mayan city of the same name, and Cenote Xcach (also spelled X-Canché), a flooded sinkhole next to a ruined jungle city that few have excavated.
Sediment cores chronicle the composition of land and water over more than 2,000 years, and periods of mercury poisoning coincide with several periods in the Preclassic and Classic periods of Maya civilization, from approximately AD 40 to 820.
Waters explained that Environmental Protection Agency In the United States, it is dangerous to drink water with mercury levels above 2 parts per billion, while the official limit for the level of mercury in fish, where it accumulates over time, is 1 part per million – anything higher means the fish can be seized by authorities.
Severe poisoning occurs when mercury levels in human blood exceed about 100 parts per billion, following drinking contaminated water or eating contaminated marine animals, such as fish. In humans, mercury poisoning can cause serious symptoms including permanent lung damage, brain damage and death.
The reddish hue of the Mayan sun god Kinich Ahau, made between the 6th and 9th centuries, now housed in the National Museum of Anthropology of Mexico, shows the Mayan love of mercury.
(Image credit: DeAgostini/Getty Images)
The most polluted parts of the Yucatan cores had a mercury level of 2.3 parts per million, the team found. “They lived through this for decades and, in one case, centuries,” Waters said.
The researchers then examined the sediment cores for signs of environmental damage caused by mercury poisoning. They found that the cores did not contain tiny freshwater shell fossils, indicating that high mercury levels were killing marine life. The team also noticed that the sediment cores showed virtually no evidence of algal blooms, which should have occurred frequently, Waters said. This is probably because the algae would not be able to survive in the nutrients of the poisoned water.
Collapse of the Mayans
Researchers debate why the Mayan civilization collapsed in the 8th and 9th centuries, but one of the main suspects is the disruption of the food supply. caused by drought.
But even though mercury levels were high during the Preclassic and Classic periods, environmental damage from mercury levels had been declining in many places for hundreds of years by the time of the Maya collapse, Waters said, although that may have been a contributing factor.
Cinnabar does not occur naturally in the Yucatán, so it must have been imported there, probably from what is now Honduras, the researchers said. It appears that these cinnabar imports eventually stopped at Lake Cobá and that poisoning there fell to a background level of around 20 parts per billion by 520 AD. However, sediment cores showed that mercury poisoning continued at Cenote Xcach until the collapse, they said.
Waters, MN, Wooten, SL, Abrook, AM, Brenner, M., Curtis, JH, Langdon, PG, Medina-Gonzalez, RM, Paradeisis-Stathis, S., & Vachula, RS (2026). Toxic mercury, aquatic ecosystem collapse, and the ancient lowland Maya. Scientific advances, 12(45), eaeh3280. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aeh3280
What do you know about the civilization that built pyramids across Mesoamerica? Find out with our ancient mayan quiz.
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