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.