Fire and Salt traces the history of how human activities have helped build the littoral landscape of Pacific coastal southern Mesoamerica over the past five thousand years. Evidence comes from airborne Lidar, surface reconnaissance and excavation within the mangrove-estuary zone, sediment coring, and a chronological framework encompassing nine ceramic complexes extending from Early Formative to Historic times.

In presenting the landscape as it exists today, this volume also describes what may soon be lost. The mangrove forests harbor a record of the human past, a focus of the present volume, but they also shield the coast from storms and tsunamis, provide nurseries for commercially important marine species, and store ltry6xarge amounts of carbon.