The most common watercraft used in Mesomerica was the dugout canoe. Rafts were used for transporting bulkier objects, but canoes were the boat of choice. The only confirmed use of a sail in the pre-Columbian Americas comes from the Monteño culture of Ecuador. These vessels may have, on occasion, traded as far north as the Pacific coast of Mexico, but the technology was never adopted elsewhere. Mesoamerican cultures did not have sails and were thus oar paddle-powered (Epstein 1990).

Most canoes were small: holding about 4-5 people. These are frequently depicted in artwork and are still in use in many parts of Mexico and Central America today. The Maya used these smaller vessels for navigating inland rivers. This can be evidenced both by historical records and the archaeological recovery of paddles found further inland (McKillop and Sabloff 2005).

In addition to this, there were also substantially larger canoes that were used on the coasts and in the highland lakes of Central Mexico. Conquistador accounts describe these as being large enough to hold up to 50 people - possibly more. Colonial era artistic depictions show them as having raised bows and sterns, and sometimes more complex features like row-locking mechanisms and on-board awnings. Take, for example, this quote from Bartolomé de Las Casas (taken from Thompson 1949):

There arrived a canoe full of Indians, as long as a galley and eight feet wide. It was loaded with merchandise from the west, almost certainly from the land of Yucatan, for that was near there [the Bay Islands], a matter of thirty leagues or a little more. There was in the middle of the canoe an awning [toldo] of [reed] matting, which they call petates in New Spain. Inside and under this were their women and children, possessions, and merchandise, so that neither rain nor sea water could wet anything... There were in the canoe up to twenty-five men.

In addition to the use of paddles (and *possibly * oars in some cases), canoes in shallow waters (such as the highland lakes of the Central Mexican Plateau) could be navigated by poles. The boat operator would have a large pole, usually in the stern of the craft, that would be used to push against the floor of the lake and propel the craft forward.

There were, of course, cultural variations on designs across Mesoamerica, but many of the details are not well established. For example, the Tarascans of West Mexico used a flat-bottom design that is easier to navigate in the shallow lakes that dominate the region while narrower v-shaped hulls were more popular for cultures that relied on river transport (Thompson 1949).

• Epstein, Jeremiah. 1990. Sails in Aboriginal America: Reevaluating Thompson's Argument. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 92, No. 1 (Mar., 1990), pp. 187-192

• McKillop, Heather and Jeremy Sabloff. 2005. Finds in Belize Document Late Classic Maya Salt Making and Canoe Transport. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Vol. 102, No. 15 (Apr. 12, 2005), pp. 5630-5634

• Thopmson, Sir Erc J. 1949. Canoes and Navigation of the Maya and Their Neighbours. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Vol. 79, No. 1/2 (1949), pp. 69-78