Travel Journal (Week 5)

18JUN2011

After a nice breakfast with Don and we said our goodbye, then I went down to the bunkhouse and said goodbye to everyone again and headed out with the British grad students. We made to PG without getting rained on and soaking our luggage and from PG to Belize, had a second breakfast and parted ways when they left for Miami. My flight to Dallas was uneventful and after a brief inspection at customs to check my jippy jop basket (a really cool chicken effigy basket that they were concerned about because they never heard of jippy jop), I grabbed a dinner at the airport, cranked up my computer and put the finishing touches on my travel journal. I just have a final leg to Cleveland left that will end in a mad dash for bed.

17JUN2011

Well all plans to make today a play day instead of a work day went out the window. However, I am excavating in the site core-it was the price I paid for going and checking it out. It is actually better than just visiting because I get to dig. The flip side of that is I have to dig and it is mostly construction fill. I am working on the unit I set in at the beginning of the trip that Clayton has been excavating. He is off collecting soil samples so I drew the duty.

Val’s unit, which is on the other side of the building, is really cool and really crazy. There are walls and floor everywhere and at all kinds of depths. It there were a few staircases it would be an M. C. Escher unit. Her drawing in the report could probably cite him. The unit I am working in has a buried wall outside a buried building. It is an old stepped pyramid that the Maya buried over and made a new plaza on top of. It is in very good shape. It was over 4 m tall, all of which is below the final plaza floor. This site was very big, very early, which I keep saying and we keep finding evidence of. I excavated through the fill down to the plaster floor that was on the top of the building and as we cleaned it off for a photo at the end of the day I found a little feature. It is a little 15-cm by 20 cm spot of dark soil on top of the floor with charcoal and ceramics in it. It might be the remains of burning ritual that dedicated the new construction or celebrate the end of use of the buried building. Of course there was about 15 min left in the day when I got it uncovered and decided it was actually a feature. There was only enough time for me to take a picture of it and I had to leave it to someone else to excavate. It cannot be more than a centimeter or two thick, but I still don’t get to excavate it, as it needed to be drawn and mapped in and stuff before I could be taken out and there wasn’t enough time. Oh well

My last dinner was not in camp, we went to town to eat at Gomier’s. I had the fish again. It was good, again. I would like to think it was a going away party for me, but I know it was more just something different to do on Friday night. I came back to camp had a few rum drinks and said my good byes before heading to my room to finish packing up. Keith is taking me to town with a couple of grad students from England at 6:00 to catch the first leg of my trip home. I am glad they are going too or he might have tried to make me stay in town Friday night and I was not packed and ready to go when we left for dinner.

16JUN2011

Plans are for this to be my last work day in the field. Tomorrow I hope to be a tourist and check out the excavations in the site core. Val and Clayton have uncovered some pretty cool buried architecture and I have not even seen pictures. My meager unit has a three-course wall and construction fill. We took it down to a little over a meter deep and it is getting to deep and too narrow to work in the unit. The good news is that there were two very good charcoal samples. The bottom of the wall is not exactly clear, but I am sticking with my original assessment that it was built on top of the plaza floor. I think we will need to excavate the other half of the unit that is outside the wall to make sure. Adam’s unit in the plaza was an even bigger bust. The shovel test he dug all over the plaza seemed to indicate that there were multiple plaza floors, but his unit went right to bedrock and didn’t even look like there was one good floor there. Hopefully we will get a better look at what is going on when we dig the rest of my unit.

My time is getting short. I am thinking about packing up. I have not done any real packing, but I am at least anticipating dreading it tomorrow. I don’t want to leave, but I am excited to get home. Working with the guys in the village and catching up with all my friends on the project has been great, but there is art, music, sailing, loved ones, and somewhat sadly work at home (not in any particular order).

15JUN2011

Excavations progressed today pretty much as planned. We took out the fill inside the platform and quickly came down on a degraded plaster floor. It appears to be the same as the plaza floor on the outside of the building, indicating that the wall through the middle of the building was constricted on the plaza floor. However, we needed to get a bit deeper to confirm it. After drawing a quick map of wall we started on the fill below the plaster floor. There were some small pavers and then some gravely fill above more substantial rock fill. We didn’t quite get deep enough in the fill to determine whether the wall really is on the plaza floor, but it will become clear tomorrow I am sure.

A family of pigs visited us at lunch. There was a sow and a couple of piglets and a couple of other juvenile pigs that ran around, rooted in the weeds and then decided to move on to other foraging grounds. They would have been the highlight of the day had I not found some charcoal in the fill below the plaster floor. It looks like a good sample (i.e., not carbonized roots that intruded there) and is in a sealed context so it should yield a good date. Datable material in a good context is one of the important things we are looking for so we can better understand the development of the site. It is a very small sample and I am hoping some more will show up, but there should be enough there to date if no more is found.

14JUN2011

The thunderstorms this morning were small and ended plenty early for me to make it into the field for my last week at the site. Low and behold, I actually found some reasonably intact architecture for a change. The unit is on the front of a low platform partly in the plaza so I could catch the front edge, which it seemed was visible on the surface. We took off the soil on top of the surface rocks, I mapped them and we started digging down and pulling the loose rock and there were the remnants of a wall. Three courses at least, probably a fourth that was mixed in with the surface tumble and maybe one or two more lower that are not exposed. We stopped at the pavers on the plaza side of the wall and the cobble fill inside it where the post occupation A horizon soils ended. Tomorrow-out comes the inside of the platform. Hopefully, there will be some carbon in there that we can date and if I am lucky some interesting artifacts. This is in the settlement, but it looks like there were multiple building episodes and there are two pretty large structures in the plaza group, so they might not have been simple farmers living here. I fully anticipate finding something cool midway through the day Friday (my last day in the field) and having to leave it to someone else to excavate; or there will be nothing but cobble fill down to the bedrock and my last chance at finding cool stuff will be over.

Keith and Yuki, the last of our vacationers, made it back today. Yuki went to Guatemala to see some sites including Tikal, a solid option when down here. Keith on the other hand went to Cleveland. He said he went to the ballet and the opera while in town. I don’t even do that kind of stuff in Cleveland and I am an artsy kind of guy. Admittedly, my tastes are bit more bohemian to be sure, but still…whatever. However, it is totally hilarious that I am here in Belize on my vacation from Cleveland enjoying the beach, the archaeology, and the exotic wonders that are Central Americas Caribbean Coast and he is going to Cleveland for a vacation from Belize.

13JUN2011

It was raining hard with thunder and lightening until well after 9:00 this morning both at camp and back in the village. It was heavy enough and lasted long enough that it was not worth going out in the field. It is my last week in the field and I kind of hate to not go out, but I also kind of hate to go out in the rain and walk muddy trails. It is all part of working in Toledo, but nobody really likes it when it gets muddy. It will be OK though. I am working with Adam at SG13 and he will be fine to take over all the excavations there once I am done for this season.

I went to town and got an extension on my passport since we were not going to do any work. After 30 days you have to pay $50 BZ ($25 US) to stay in the country any longer. It is no big deal, but you have to go to customs and take care of it. I needed the extension for my last three days. Somehow my trips always seem to last just a few more than 30 days. The extra day not in the field at least gives me time to download my camera and go through my pictures. I have to separate out the project photos and my personal snapshots so I can upload the pictures of the units to a project computer. We always take tons of them even though few of them ever get used for the reports or other publications. It is good practice to document things thoroughly and they are always helpful when it comes time to write the report and it has been eight months since you did the fieldwork. Notes can only go so far in reminding me what I did and found.

Travel Journal (Week 4)

12JUN2011

I toyed with the idea of going out for another day of diving, but the weather in the morning was worse than Saturday and I didn’t want to go out to Laughing Bird again. Next year I may try diving with a different outfit. I really like Patty and diving with Splash, but a friend who is a boat captains in Placencia started his own business up the coast a bit. He is working with a woman who I have dove with many times, although she was usually an instructor with students and not the dive master for the group of divers I was with. Both of them are people I enjoy spending time with. They go to South Water Caye and Glovers Reef, and probably Tobacco Caye. I have been to South Water once and always wanted to check out Glovers. Tobacco is supposed to be nice too, but they are all far enough north of Placencia that Splash does not typically go to them. A bunch of people from the project went to Hopkins, a Garifuna village south of Dangriga, and I am waiting to hear the reviews. It is even farther up the coast and dive shops there will go to Tobacco for sure as well as Glovers Reef. However, I opted for several hours in a hammock instead of diving and left all that for another time; probably next year. My biggest accomplishment for the day was buying a basket, oh and doing laundry after I got back to camp.

11JUN2011

Reef diving was the agenda of the day, but it got off to a slow start as we waited for the weather to clear. It was about 10:00 by the time we were heading out and with the late start we only went to Laughing Bird Caye, a national park that is nice, but not on the barrier reef. I have had some nice dives there, but the best ones have all been on the outer reef. Unfortunately it is about twice as far to those dive sites so time concerns kept the trip back and forth shorter. We got to the island and the ranger gave us a brief orientation informing us of the half of the island where the birds are breading and we are not aloud to go and pointing out the three places we were aloud to enter the water from to go snorkeling. The island is quite small. It is probably 600–700 ft long and about 50 ft wide. We had two dives and a nice lunch of yellow rice and barbequed chicken wings for lunch. There were a lot of nice small fish, but not much spectacular.

I enjoyed just being underwater and swimming along the reef. They were shallow drift dives, so there were no concerns about decompression or running out of air; both of which I had to deal with for our whale shark dives. It was a nice casual day on the reef. We saw some crabs and lobsters, a stonefish, a big spotted drumfish, a hawksbill turtle, some kid of fish I don’t know the name of, but it changes its markings to a vibrant neon blue when agitated. There were also several lionfish. Not as many as I was expecting, but still several. They are a scourge on the reef, eating so many of the juvenile fish that it is probably going to throw things out of whack forever. Originally from the Pacific Ocean, they supposedly got out onto the reef because Katrina destroyed an aquarium housing numerous specimens that escaped when they were washed into the sea by the storm. I know there was a bounty on them for a while last year, but it may have been lifted. They are beautiful fish, but as they are a problematic invasive species, it would be better not to see them.

10JUN2011

Today I got up early and packed, caught the bus, caught the water taxi, and walked to the beach and checked into my hotel where I pretty much went to my hammock and stayed. There was a bit of swimming we drank a few beers and went out to dinner at Rum Fish, which I am still not sick of even after eating dinner there every night I have spent in Placencia, and called it an early evening. We are going on a reef dive tomorrow and I don’t think I need to get drunk tonight and be hung over for maximum enjoyment. Nothing seemed to be shaking at Barefoot and Tipsy Tuna was dead so I will probably go hangout in my hammock again for a little bit and go to bed. I have a room that is no more than 100 feet from the shore of the Caribbean and my hammock is the closest part of it; strung up on my seaside porch.

09JUN2011

Excavations at SG13. It is a large plaza group with at least three buildings on it. The plaza is about 25 m square overlooking Rio Blanco. It is a nice spot. The hilltop has been modified and the sides appear to have been faced with sandstone to give it the appearance of a much larger construction. This is very typical for Uxbenka, as all the major areas are on large hills that have been faced with sandstone to resemble the large pyramids built at other major Maya centers. There is one large building on the edge of the valley along the south edge of the plaza. It is completely dug up with four big looters holes on the top of the platform. There is a second large building off of the plaza on a small toe to the west. The sides of the building are still there but the inside of the platform has been completely dug out. Looters destroyed the two large buildings at the group, but there is a low platform that is still relatively intact. I set in a unit on the front and top of it to see how much has survived a millennium of trees and rodents. We also set in a 5-m grid and Adam is digging test pits to see what kinds of deposits are spread out across the plaza. So far it looks like there were at least two or three different plaza floors that were built on top of each other, so it is likely that the earliest material at the plaza group will date to the early part of the site’s occupation. I do not think there is much hope I will find any of it on the small structure I am excavating the unit on-it probably dates to the latest part of the site’s occupation when I assume the top plaza floor was built. There could be some early datable material below the plaza floors, so even if the unit on the structure yields nothing we could find some interesting information there anyway.

Dinner in town was fun. Everyone went and we played some pool drank a few beers had some food and enjoyed the evening, but I think everyone was mostly looking forward to the beach trips planned for the next morning. I know I was.

08JUN2011

Well, my excavations at SG62 were pretty much a total bust. Nothing of note, no charcoal for a date, not really much of anything was recovered. At least the second structure was a structure extending about 1 m down to the bedrock, but there was even les in that unit than the axial trench. On the good side, the blue truck (Ford F350) and the white truck (Ford Ranger) are back in action. I went to town to deal with cell phone issues and was pleased that if they do what they say it will be one day and about $40 to fix the problem. We also decided that we should all go to town for dinner tomorrow. It will not be a fancy affair, but it is at an open patio overlooking the Caribbean where they serve inexpensive beer and simple food. We are working a short week, so tomorrow is the first night of the weekend before everyone heads off to various spots for a bit of R&R. I am of course going to the beach to do some diving.

It is so clear today for some reason. I guess the rain has washed the smoke out of the sky or something. Driving into town we could see the mountains in Honduras, which typically are obscured from view. I noticed walking around camp how bright it was. There is only a half moon, and it is behind some light clouds, but I could see everything. It helps that I already know where and what everything is, but still it was easy to see by the moonlight. Usually it is not until the moon is full that it is so easy to see. The clouds mostly obscured the stars and the moonlight drowned them out a bit, but it was still a nice night. I love looking at the stars. The moon should set in three or four hours. I will probably get up and take a look if the clouds abate. On clear nights there are so many stare visible in the sky it is difficult to pick out the constellations. It is frustrating, but and irritation most tolerable.

07JUN2011

Today was another day at the site like most others it was hot and rainy and the bugs were into everything. For whatever reason the ants in the area I am currently excavating are particularly industrious. They have gotten into peoples lunches both yesterday and today. Other critters seem intent on human interaction as well. There was a butterfly that landed on my backpack and hung out for a while. It let me get close and actually climbed onto my hand and hung out there for a while. It flitted off and then landed on my arm and then my hat. I pulled my hat off to look at it and it stayed and I put my hat back on and it still stayed. It came and went landing on me again and again for about ten minutes. It was nothing huge, but it was still kind of cool-and it was the highlight of my day.

06JUN2011

Today was the beginning of my fourth workweek. It as a pleasant enough with light drizzle most of the day. It kept the temperature down below 90°, which is dam pleasant. Clair came out to start excavating at SG62 with me. She is working on the largest of the four platforms in the plaza group. Her unit will be four times the size of the one I opened up. I was all set up and ready to go, but we needed to get a tarp set up over Clair’s excavation, which took a couple of hours maybe once all was said and done. So far all I have found in my little unit is a few pieces of pottery and the odd piece of chert. We got through the surface layer and into the structure fill, but I cannot tell how deep it will go. It is deeper than the last one I looked at so that is at least something.

We went to Las Faldos, as we do more evenings than not. It was raining lightly for a while and a spectacular double rainbow came out. The inner one was super intense and the outer one, while dimmer, was totally visible. I of course did not have my camera or my phone with me, but fortunately others in the group did and within a matter of minutes we were trading photos and comments about it with people on facebook, some back in the states and some a few feet away. It is odd to have that kind of conversation, but we were there contacting friends and family back home so it seemed natural to comment on a post by someone sitting a two people down the bar as others chimed in from back home in the states.

Travel Journal (Week 3)

05JUN2011

Santa Cruz had a soccer marathon today. It was a big day in the village, the Catholics even canceled mass (or so I was told). It is a single elimination tournament where the games consist of two short halves. They seemed to last 10 minutes, possibly 15. The top three teems take home a cash prize and the village gets a chance to raise some always much-needed cash from the concessions. I contributed a couple of beers and a barbequed chicken lunch’s worth. The soccer was actually pretty good. One of the matches going down to penalty kicks. We only stayed a couple of hours, a good part of it visiting with Kristina, who is one of the cultural anthropologists associated with the project staying in the village. I saw Joel, the Peace Corps guy who was working in Santa Cruz for a while before being given a more administrative job and moving to town (PG). It was good to be in the village on a day when we were not working at the site.

On the way back to camp the blue truck bit it again. This time it was a broken leaf spring. The power steering is only half fixed and the driver’s seat is still stuck all the way forward. Keith is going to Cleveland next weekend and will return with the parts to fix it. The leaf spring is an entirely different kettle of fish. We have to find that down here and I don’t think that is going to be very easy. The road to the village eats vehicles and I don’t know if there has been a season when all of the trucks were in for reasonably major repairs. Thankfully Bruno has trucks and vans that he can rent us in a pinch.

We were supposed to have been picking Bruno and some of his guests up to take them back after the marathon, which we ended up not needing to do. He got stuck with some people who couldn’t make it to the end of the hike they hired him to guide and had retreated to Santa Cruz from where they had no transport back to Sun Creek, Bruno’s resort. We were happy to and would have gladly brought them back had someone from his place not showed up to rescue them, so the favors go both ways and all is good.

04JUN2011

Today I made myself some breakfast from leftovers. I had intended to go to town, but they left earlier than they said and I was just getting out of bed. Brendan went off to work in the lab and by the afternoon most people were going to go to the pool. I opted out for no particular reason. I took the day to write some emails and do a little laundry. I did download my camera and went through my pictures from the project. I should get some of them saved in a format that can go in this journal, but somehow it seems like too much effort at the moment. I will just throw a nice shot of where Val is working in Group B in here and see how it goes when I upload it. I didn’t do jack squat today so I might as well at least try and see if I can get this to work so when I do nothing again I will be able to go back and just add some pictures to the journal and reminisce about things that happened earlier in my trip.

03JUN2011

Friday comes to Toledo just like it does at home. Work is not drudgery here so it is not such a sharp contrast with the weekend, but Friday does mean a couple of days off working in the field. Today work was not too exciting. I found out that the platform I was excavating is very shallow and may not have been anything more than a rise on the hilltop. There were never any well-defined edges to it and after excavating down to the bedrock it became apparent that all of the sandstone boulders I assumed were construction blocks could just have been rocks. I am sure there was a pole building on top of the little rise and it is definitely part of the plaza group, I just don’t know that it was ever a stone platform. Meh, they all can’t be exiting. After finishing the unit we set in another on an adjacent platform, this one looks built for sure, but we will see. We moved the tarp and by the time we were set up there was not enough time left in the day to bother opening the unit. Now I am back at camp and getting ready to go out to do Internet and have a few stouts.

The dynamic in camp is changing a bit. Willa went to Chicago for a wedding a few days ago, Carman arrived a couple of days ago, and Yuki just made it to camp today. Last year we stopped at the Tiki bar most days on the way home because it was at Dump where vehicles parted ways and passengers were consolidated for the short trip north on the Southern Highway to camp as Keith and other VIP types went toward town to Bruno’s where they stayed. This year the bar is not what it was last and we have not had so many people that they couldn’t all fit in the blue truck and go straight to camp so we have not stopped there much. Brendan tried to meet us there on his way to camp from PG and apparently we drove past him. Today was the firs time we stopped there since I have been in the field and just by coincidence Yuki was on the bus and saw us. She was able to get off and catch our attention. We were almost ready to head off as the bus pulled up. I think I have fallen into the routine of the UAP when a simple coincidence is a noteworthy occurrence. Sometimes I need to remind myself how cool all this is.

02JUN2011

For me today was just another day at the site. We dug; we found some pottery, chert, obsidian blades, etc., and we got a bit deeper into the structure. Clayton, on the other hand is digging in the site core at the unit I laid out a couple of weeks ago. I was sent off to dig settlement and he got to do the unit. He is down over 3 m from the surface and has found the remains of a buried building beneath the structure and plaza floor at the surface. We knew from previous excavations that there were at least three building episodes in that part of the site core, and large boulders that were used as fill in a building on the opposite side of the plaza, led me to conclude that there had been some big buildings up there prior to the construction of the ones on the surface. They just seemed too large to have been hauled up to the ridgetop simply to be used as fill. They had to have been construction blocks for earlier buildings that were being reused as fill for the later ones. It was the only thing that made sense to me. There were some other units that had buried architectural remains that hinted this was the case, but from the description Clayton has given, this seals the deal; not that it was a particularly insightful conclusion, but it is nice to be right.

The blue truck is back in action. it just blew a hose. We were fortunate that the fitting, which needed to be replaced, was available and could be flown down from Belize City this morning. It seemed dire yesterday as it sat dripping fluid on the side of the soccer pitch where we pulled it off the road. We will see if the switch we need to replace so the drivers seat will move back from its fully forward position has arrived. I think it had to be ordered from the US, so it could be a while.

01JUN2011

Today more rain came to the village. It is the rainy season as of June and it has come right on time. I went out to a new settlement group. It is nice and surprisingly it is not looted. There are four low platforms around a plaza and I am starting my excavations with an axial trench across the center of the northern building in the plaza group. We spent most of the day clearing off the vegetation to identify the corners and find the center, setting in the unit, and putting up the tarp. The rain today was heavy thunderstorms with 10–15 knot winds. Nothing crazy, but we had to do a little adjusting of the tarp to keep it from falling down. It stayed up, but we got soaked. You would think I would have this figured out by now, but no; I had the tarp set up facing the wrong way, plus we set it up too high so it will not provide sufficient shade from the sun or protection from the rain, but it is at least something. We will do a better job when we move it to the next spot, or I might take it down and set it back up the right way tomorrow morning. We have all the sticks so it wouldn’t take that long.

The blue truck, which has been named Ethula, broke down today. It has been having problems with the power steering and something blew up as we were getting ready to head home today. The power-steering fluid that sprayed out and was dripping out of the truck was black and unless I am mistaken it should be pink. We managed to limp the truck back, no small feet on the hilly, gravel road from the village to the Southern Highway. A necessity, as although the Internet has made it to Toledo, there are no tow trucks (funny world we live in). It is now at Dick’s garage and hopefully we can order the parts needed to fix it and have Adam, one of the people yet to arrive at camp, bring them down from the US. I feel for Adam, as every day there seems to be one or two things that get mentioned as something he can bring down with him.

31MAY2011

Today the rain came to the village. It was just a few short showers, not even half an inch probably, but it was something. A good sign of what is to come and enough I think that the corn will be OK for several days if it doesn’t come right away.

I found a feature in the bottom of my unit, which is a surprisingly rare event considering we are working at a densely occupied site. I thought it might be there and then gave up on it only to find out I was right after all. It was just a soft spot with a bit darker soil that had not discernable shape, we pulled back all the structure fill composing the bottom layer of the platform exposing the bedrock and I though it was just a low spot in the uneven surface of the nib (the local name for the siltstone bedrock in the area), but it turned out to be a post hole. There were thatched pole buildings on top of probably all of these platforms and I don’t know why we don’t see more post holes. My best guess is it is easier for plants to grow in them and animals to burrow through them and they end up getting destroyed over time. The only reason I found this one was because it had been dug into the bedrock. There was nothing in it, but it was still cool to find.

We finished our unit and moved on to some salvage work cleaning out a looter’s pit. There are several people in the village who still loot the site and there have been for well over 50 years. It is a problem you have to live with here. As he was digging through some fill in the bottom of the hole, Epinito found a little piece of jade. It is only polished on one side and does not appear to be shaped, but it is always exciting to find something the Ancient Maya held precious. The day before he found half of a polished stone bead. It was actually a much more interesting find, having been shaped, drilled and polished, but it was some black onyxlike stone. I am not sure what it is except that it is not jade.

30MAY2011

Monday came and went without incident. None of the rain from yesterday made it out to the site and the guys in the village are starting to worry about their corn. It will be June in a couple of days and that is when the rainy season starts so it shouldn’t be long before the corn gets a drink. I have seen it go three weeks without rain after people have planted and it gets pretty tense. Crop loss for subsistence farmers is no joke. Personally, I really like the nice dry trails, but even I am not so selfish as to not hope for rain.

The two guys I am working with this week are friend who I actually remember. I have a terrible time with names and it is bad with the men in the village who I should know, and often do, but cannot recall their names. Benancio and Epinito I do remember however-how I don’t know. We have had many interesting conversations over the last several years and I like working with them both, I actually think they worked together with me last season too.

Andy, the owner of Las Faldos, is putting in a zip line. It will go in four or five stages from platform to platform extending along, across, and back across the river for I think 500 m. Regardless of the absolute length, it will be the longest of three in Belize and should reach speeds of about 60 mph. He got is first cable strung over the weekend although it still needs to be tensioned. It is a slow process to get it done, being too hot to work most days and soon too wet. I kind of doubt I will be around when it is operational, but it is a cool addition to southern Belize. There has been all kinds of talk about it and it is good to see some cable finally up.