Halcyon Days of Yore

Halcyon days of yore; a quaint idiom referencing an, oftentimes idealized, happiness of a long-past youthful carefreeness; but where does it come from? Who used it first or made it famous? To me it always sounds like an idiot's pretentious parroting of some misplaced intellectual conspicuous in popular culture (I’m thinking Howard Cosell), that is awkwardly crammed into a conversation to give the impression that the speaker could be a Shakespearian scholar and not just a total blockhead. My personal prejudices regarding this underused cliché and penchant to break it out to sarcastically ape the buffoon I see in all of us aside, I was interested in its history. Yes, the internet clued me in to its origins in Greek mythology, which I actually expected, and that Shakespeare did in fact make reference to halcyon, as I was fairly certain he had, (although he did not coin the phrase as I suspected), but there does not seem to be any information about its popular use.

“Halcyon days" comes from a Greek myth and refers to a week of calm weather during the winter before and after the solstice. Áλκυόνη, the daughter of a god named Æolus with power over the wind, and her husband Ceyx, the king of Thessaly, were transformed into áλκυώνες (translated as halcyon, which are mythical birds typically associated with kingfishers) when she threw herself into the sea in an act of grief over his death in a shipwreck. Æolus granted them seven days of calm weather each year for nesting, which became known as the halcyon days. Yore is Middle English for long past or long ago. It seems to be generally understood to refer to ones youth and is now only used in the phrase “days of yore.” All well and good, but when was that eureka moment when some literary giant, or corny sports caster, exclaimed, “you got chocolate in my peanut butter” and the world replied with a resounding, “no you got peanut butter in my chocolate” giving rise to the iconic, and exquisitely wordy Reese’s-Peanut-Butter-Cup-esque expression used to denote nostalgia, "halcyon days of yore." Even the mighty Google fails in all attempts to find an attribution or explanation of the inception, popularization (as it is), and enduring use of this presumably arcane idiom. C'est la vie.

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.

Travel Journal (Week 2)

29MAY2011

It rained hard for about an hour today. It is the first significant rain I have seen since arriving almost two weeks ago. I am certain it will not be the last. The downpour was enough to wash the smoke out of the air and impart a crispness to the greenery now relieved of weeks of the soot, ash, and dust that result from swidden agriculture. The sun is back out and it sparkles across the landscape. The aptly named flamboyant trees are heavily laden with deep pink flowers, many of which now litter the ground beneath them. In the afternoon sun those that remain on the trees blaze fire-red while those below wither in the heat. The butterflies and humming birds flit about drawn to the brighter colors and freshened scents. The cacophony of birdcalls that is a continuous din from sunup to sundown seems even louder; as though they need to make up for the hour they were drowned out by the rain on a metal roof. It is only what is just off my porch, but today it seems like plenty to write about.

28MAY2011

I slept in about five hours this morning, still rising well before noon and in time to prepare myself a nice brunch of roast-beef hash and fried eggs. The bad belly is persistent, but I refuse to submit totally. If I can get it down to four short meetings today I think I will call it good. We are having BBQ at Las Faldos for dinner and I am not sure if I will make it for that, but the hash and eggs I had for brunch should get me through the day. I did not go to PG or to Big Falls Lodge to swim at the pool, although I did want to sport my new Speedo and lounge (mostly the former as I am evil). However, ignoring a problem and disregarding it are different matters entirely. ‘Tis but a short trot to my bathroom from camp, not so much from town or the pool; there may be a few matters for the minister and I to hash out before all is said and done.

Not much else is likely to be happening today. I am assuming that Foca, our favorite laundry detergent, was purchased in town and I can do some wash and that is about all I have on my plate. The bottle of scotch sitting on the table in front of me is starting to look very tempting, but I think I will wait until brunch settles to think about it. I did have a limejuice with honey and rum-for medicinal purposes of course-after brunch, but whisky during the day sound like tempting fate. A wee dram and some nice cool water in the evening does however sound particularly enticing. I don’t know what happened to the days when malaria was feared and gin and tonics were daily necessities, but they seem long in the past. I have not had gin or seen tonic water in several years down here. Kristina, who is staying in the village, said she was sick and was going to get some leaves from one of the bush doctors and chew on them to calm her stomach. She will almost certainly see better results, but I am still sticking to alcohol as a cure-all. It at least kills all the nasties in the water and I can stay hydrated as much more juice is leaving my body than under normal circumstances.

27MAY2011

Not much shaking on the excavation front today. I finished the 2x2 unit I was working on and set in a 1x2 on a nearby building platform. This one is definitely a platform. I am hoping to find sufficient evidence of domestic activity to indicate there was a house on it to connect the manufacturing activity at the opposite end of the plaza with the overall research goals of the project this year to explore settlement at the site. We will see what we will see, but I may not even excavate the unit, as I have to go back out and document the axial trench I started at SG09.

The big doings of the day, except of course for the karaoke at Las Faldos, was the meeting between the leadership groups of Santa Cruz and San Antonio to decide if we can still work out at SG09 (and adjacent SG10). There was never any real hope that the boundary issue would be resolved, but I did expect them to let us work out there. However, the San Antonio folks were well prepared and insistent that the land should be under their authority, while the people form Santa Cruz were ill prepared to offer any coherent resistance to the idea or stand up for themselves. I think they just showed up and hoped for the best. In the end the decision was that the ownership of the land was still in dispute and we would not be aloud to work there. Monday we will go out and record the extent of our excavations and backfill the units.

The other big news of the day is that the lidar survey was started. When they are done (after three days of flyovers and about six months of data crunching) we will have a topo map of the site with about 50-cm accuracy, which is pretty fucking good. I think they may have done a few runs Thursday, but there were several problems with the permits, the most serious being that one of the guys at the airport was saying that they were only aloud one takeoff and landing, not the 30 days worth that had been arraigned. I am guessing some words and paper money were exchanged and the problem was solved, but I did not hear this directly. Michael, the lidar guy on the ground here with us, is a practical man and I assume this is how he got it done. I know he expects to need to grease a few palms while working in Central America. I like him. He just kind of dropped into camp and will be with us for the five or six days it takes to complete the survey, but he fits in well with the group. Baring unforeseen complications, it will be a short one-time addition to the ever growing group affiliated with the Uxbenka Archaeological Project (UAP). I know he will probably be back in Belize next year as several projects in Cayo are writing a grant to have them come fly the areas they are working in so they can have similarly fucking awesome maps (keeping up with the Joneses you know).

For my part of today’s drama, I got the bad belly. Every year I get some type of food poisoning or other microbial nonsense that chains my ass to a toilet for a day or two. It took almost two weeks this season, but the inevitable was…well inevitable. I missed karaoke as I had a big meeting with the minister (a popular local euphemism is to have a meeting with the minister; something about paperwork I think) before and after dinner, which prompted me to stay close to my bathroom rather than go out drinking with everyone. I heard that there was more ranting and less singing than would have been enjoyable so no harm I guess. Me and the minister are fast friends now and I think it was a shrewd political move on my part to skip Friday night on the town.

26MAY2011

Today was another day at SG37. There was surprisingly no talk of the burning the day before. Tomorrow is the meeting between the leaders of the two villages. I actually doubt there will be any resolution to the boundary issue, but one never knows. It should resolve the issue of us working out there and I am cautiously optimistic it will be positive as we are technically permitted to be there by the national government and the local authorities are bound by law to respect that permit.

Today was hot, big surprise. Work went fine, but very slow in the afternoon. We found nothing much of note except some stuff that looks like fossil bone. I got several pieces in my unit and Clair got at least one in hers. It may be petrified wood, but it seems more bonelike to me, but I am no paleontologist. The structure seems to be more platformy than originally suspected, but still not totally convincing. We almost finished our 2-m by 2-m unit today and will get it done tomorrow morning. What next I do not know. OK, I do know that karaoke is on the program for tomorrow night-I am thrilled beyond expression of this prospect. And on that bombshell…

25MAY2011

My new place to work is with Clair at SG37, a pleasant 5 min. hike in from the road onto a hill top about 300 m across the ravine from the stela plaza. It was suspected to be a residential group, but there is a lot of manufacturing going on there. Clare is finding incense burners of various types that do not appear to have been used, which at this point we think may indicate that they were being made there. She also recovered a bunch of obsidian flakes. There are obsidian blades all over the place, as they were a ubiquitous tool, but flakes indicate that they were working with the raw material to shape the cores that the blades were struck off of, or at least that is the current thinking. It is not surprising that there are manufacturing areas near the site core. I think the farther away from the center of the site the more likely it is that most of what went on was farming, but near the center there was virtually certainly trade and production for trade occurring. This appears to be evidence of that, albeit preliminary.

The small structure I am digging on is barely recognizable as a structure and in fact I am still somewhat unconvinced it is a platform for a building. It probably is as it is a small raised area with a bunch of stones in it, but it is all blown out and there was just a suggestion of an edge to it along the plaza side. I am not finding anything much just a few pot sherds and a couple of pieces of chert, except for the small ground stone celt, which was cool enough to make it work working there, but nothing cool like Clair’s haul from her unit on the next building over.

On the boarder war front, people from San Antonio came out the area near where we had been working and started burning fields, a fairly aggressive statement of reproach for our encroachment on to land they want to claim as there own. Burning fields as in burning them in preparation for planting, not crop burning. The Santa Cruz folks I am working with are being tight lipped about it, but I suspect it is a hot topic around the village and this will not go unnoticed.

24MAY2011

Back to work and back to SG09 and my long hike, it is really only a little bit more than a mile, but I take a lot of water, which makes my pack heavy, it is hilly and hot, and I am really not in shape for this; whatever. It was much less difficult after a week of acclimating to the heat and a weekend at the beach. I huffed and puffed, but made it no problem.

There has been an ongoing boundary dispute between Santa Cruz, the village we work in and with, and the next village down the road (San Antonio) from which they split off of I am guessing about 50 years ago and no more than half again that. San Antonio is an older village established when the Maya fled Guatemala in the nineteenth century. It is fairly large with a population of at least a couple of thousand, maybe as many as five (fact checking is not gona be a big priority in this exercise).

Some people from San Antonio have been farming on the Santa Cruz side of the disputed boundary and that is where the part of the site I have been working at is located. Farmers from San Antonio have been coming out to our excavations and complaining that we were on their land and there has been some back and forth that I thought had been resolved over the weekend while I was at the beach. It is between the villages and we are aloud to dig where the site goes regardless. However, at the end of the day the police constable from San Antonio showed up and took everyone’s names and told us we could not work there until the matter had been settled between the villages. There had already been a meeting set up for that Friday that I only found out about when I talked to the Santa Cruz Village Chairman, who was working with me that day. The San Antonio farmers were not to overtly threatening, but they were certainly vexed by our presence and refusal to leave at the behest of local farmers who had no authority in the village. I was a bit annoyed that they kept coming out to harass us.

I was happy the cops finally showed up. The constable was most interested in this not escalating as some of the San Antonio farmers were starting to get belligerent and hostile was just below the surface. He was the only person from San Antonio with any authority that seemed willing to deal with these angry farmers. I was not that happy that he said we couldn’t work there until the meeting on Friday, but I don’t think he was up for the hour hike out there the next day when it all started over again. I can’t blame him for that.

23MAY2011

Yesterday’s dinner was great; I can’t say enough about Rum Fish. They pit together a seating for twenty-some college kids and a table of “adults” Sunday night that went off without a hitch. The food was just as good as the other four times I have been there and they serve pretty good wine. I like the finer things in life even if I am in out of the way places.

I took a day off-day off. Sometimes I am so busy having fun I don’t have time to enjoy myself. Not Monday. I got out of bed around 10:00 had a bite to eat at De Tatch after packing up and checking out of my room, leaving everything, including my computer in front office of the Sea Spray Hotel (the place I always stay in Placencia). After that I lounged on the beach the rest of the day, only taking a short walk to the store to get money put on my cell phone. I was a bit lazy in getting to the Hokey Pokey and the first boat was full and pulled away from the dock without me (much to the consternation of Doug who I was supposed to be shepherding back to camp via public transportation). The brought another boat and took me and the other ten people that didn’t get on the first boat over to Mango Creek and I caught up with him at the bus stop; no big whoop.

Travel Journal (Week 1)

22MAY2011

For me, Placencia diving means Splash Dive. Patty is great and she runs a great dive center. She and her staff always go above and beyond. Today I went on a whale shark dive with Keith and Doug. Prince, a dive master I have gone out with for several years now, was in charge of the dive and all went smoothly and was fun. There was not much to see on the first dive, but they are blue water dives so there are not many reef fish and whatnot about, just whale sharks and huge shoals of snappers. The snappers spawn and the sharks feast. We did see a whale shark though and a few snappers, not even a dozen. It was cool, as you never know if you will see one at all. The second dive we found a huge shoal of snappers. Prince said there were easily more than 10,000. The basic game is to find the snappers and stay above them and hope some of the whale sharks come up to feed while you are there. I wish a bunch had, but only one did. The literature says that most of the sharks in this area are young solitary males and the two we saw were no more than 40 ft long. The can get to 60 ft or more. I have done dozens of reef dives so I figured I would take a shot and see if we could get out and dive with some sharks and it paid off.

As well as the whale sharks there was a snapper that had been hooked and broke the line swimming with the school that we rescued. I am not sure if the bull shark that showed up at the same time we ran across it was looking for it or us, but it kept its distance and once we let the snapper off the hook the bull shark swam off into the blue. It was big and cool to see, but I was happy that it was a short encounter; they have a reputation for being aggressive and dangerous.

Last night we had dinner at Rum Fish, which was excellent and a nice night out with Clair, Ethan, Doug and Keith. Tonight we are going back with a bunch (20ish) of USC students. It will be pretty zooy, but I will have fresh whale shark adventures to regale the kids with. The food is excellent, I had poached fish with onions and peppers and a nice eggplant side. It rocked, I am not sure what I am up for this evening, but I know it will be good.

Tomorrow it is over to Mango Creek on the Hokey Pokey and the bus to Big Falls. I am sure I will get shit for missing work on Monday, but I think everyone knows that they will be having a better time than me. For now, I am sitting at De Tatch, inches from the sand, feet from the see, and worlds away from the cares of the world.

21MAY2011

Palm fronds rattling in a stiff onshore; Belizean Creole spoken in a thick accent by a couple of women enjoying a Saturday afternoon a few chairs down the beach; the rhythmic crash of small, wind-blown rollers on the sand; salt on my lips and the coolness of wet clothes against my skin after a swim; no sweat, no stress, no where to be, no things to get done; Placencia.

20MAY2011

I went back out to the settlement group I worked in my first day. We cleared off tree small structures, laid out a 1-m by 6-m axial trench, put up a tarp over the excavation unit, and got through most of the first level of excavation. The buildings are small (4 m to 5 m on a side) and little more than a jumble of rocks on the surface. There was not much in the first level; maybe a dozen small sherds of pottery and a small chunk of chert. You never know, but it is unlikely that anything spectacular will come out of the small house mounds in the settlement portions of the site. They were mostly just farmers that were living there.

The fifth annual Toledo Cacao Fest wine and chocolate party kicked off the weekend celebration at a seaside hotel in PG Friday night. It was a swanky affair with plenty of wine and chocolate for all. I was not in a particularly social mood for whatever reason, but I still managed to enjoy myself. Lots of the townsfolk turned out in their finest, although it seemed decidedly like a gringo-fest rather than a local shindig, but what you going to do. Confections seemed the mainstay of the chocolate theme, as well they should, but there was an interesting cacao wine made from the slimy stuff around the beans when they are fresh in the pods. It was sour and a bit citrusy and fairly enjoyable, but didn’t have much chocolate in the background. There was also some cacoa liqueur, which I avoided. There was a good fireworks show at the end too, but a chunk of one of the misfires hit Amy in the face. No damage, but a little scary.

19MAY2011

I worked in the site core today. It was a much easier hike, which was a good thing on such a hot day. I think all the days are going to be extra hot, which I guess means they are not extra, but just regular hot. I had a crew of guys from the village clearing off the side of a building next to one of the ball courts at the site (pictures were taken, but I am too lazy right now to figure out how to add them). The opposite side of the building has some of the best intact architecture at the site (yah yah, pictures; whatever). The side I was working on appears to be totally blown out. A few days of excavation should get that figured out.

Excitement for the day was some border dispute action involving a few young punks from the next village down the road who were all in a huff about some work that was allegedly done in land for San Antonio, but all that know the score seem to be sure is actually for Santa Cruz and the kids are just causing trouble without any real cause. Someone from Santa Cruz, the village where the site is located and who the project has been working with for the last seven years, is going to go talk to the Alcalde in San Antonio tomorrow to get it straightened out.

Don, Becky, I had a nice visit after work, although it was a bit short as showing was needed badly after my day in the field. She is the lead cultural anthropologist on the project and I wish she could spend more time, but she has a new baby and is all about raising her kind. Becky is great and I always regret not paying more attention to what her research is. At least she was here long enough to buy me a couple of beers. I had hoped to return the favor this evening, but she ended up stuck ate Jimmy and Fancisca’s because Jimmy tore apart the front seat of the truck to see if he could get it to slide back. Electric connivances on vehicles don’t stay convenient very long in Belize and the switch moving the seat back and forth is stuck with the seat all the way forward. He couldn’t fix it, but at least he tried. I will just have to catch up with Becky more the next time I see her. She is leaving tomorrow and won’t be back until August when I won’t be here.

18MAY2011

First day in the field started with a 5:00 AM alarm, which I was awake to hear. I was glad I had taken the time to unpack and get my field gear together so I just had to get dressed and fill my water bottles. I went down to camp where people were still waking up and made some breakfast; scrambled egg sliders with cheesy salsa eggs on left over diner rolls with a bit of greens and tomato from last night’s diner salad (salads are a treat and I was lucky to have some). We drove off to the field and I steeled myself for the jarring ride down the very rough road back into the Maya villages from the Southern Highway. It is now under construction, which will improve the road and even half built is an improvement, it made my stomach turn to see construction start. I have known it was coming since the beginning of the project in 2005, but somehow hoped Belize would screw it up and they would put the Pan-American Highway through Cayo and the Belize Valley. The road through the villages now ends at the boarder and while locals cross illegally on foot, there is no vehicle traffic; it is a road to the villages. Now it will be a through road with an official border crossing and traffic and development will change everything in Toledo. I have written enough culture histories to know with improved transportation comes wholesale change. I don’t begrudge the Maya their chance to get a better crack at the world and move away from subsistence farming. It is coming road or not, but the dust and machinery just seem to make horrifically real what I was able to pretend was not inevitable as my kidneys took the beating on that so familiar stretch of rough road.

Excavations were nothing spectacular. It was a long hike and coming back out to the road about did me in. I sat the truck with the AC on and had a hydration packet and the nausea soon passed, just to return as we drove out through the construction. My legs are sore and I am glad I have been reassigned to a different part of the site. I liked working with Clayton of Boarder Taco fame. He wrote a poem about a bad taco experience coming back across the border from Guatemala to Belize, which was later set to music a performance of which ended up on YouTube and facebook. It is good to see him return to the project, but the hike up the farmer’s road to Group B in the Site Core is much more manageable in this heat. After a week or so I will be fine, but it was a tough first day hike.

17MAY2011

Got up and decided to try and do a travel journal. I don’t actually have high hopes for it working out, but what the fuck. Donna is not up and I kept my computer on to chat with her before heading off to see if I can’t actually get to Belize today. So here I sit, stale hotel coffee in hand writing about yesterday and contemplating today’s adventure. I have no idea how I will be getting to camp from Belize City. Presumably my ride left yesterday with everyone I was supposed to be meeting there and I am on my own to make arrangements. I know how to get there and several routes I can take. However, there is also the significant obstacle of getting past Placencia, which is on the way-oh so temptingly on the way. The Siren call of the beach has sucked me in on every previous trip. I know that there would be time to fly there stick my feet in the sand and eat something then catch the Hokey Pokey water taxi across to Mango Creek and catch the bus to camp. We will just have to see how the day progresses.

I made it to Belize and caught a nonstop to Punta Gorda (PG), circumventing the Placencia conundrum, and of course had a few Belikins at Jets. Jet is a tiny man, who with his son runs a small bar in the airport. It has been there since I first came through and will probably survive me. A place of some local renown, he serves cold beer, strong drinks, and bad bar food to the gringos passing through to other destinations in Belize or heading home. After a brief stop in PG I took the local bus to Big Falls and arrived at camp just in time to watch the truck leave about an hour and a half early to come get me. Much hugging and catching up ensued.

Don is a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon and a hell of a guy. He has provided space for researches in Southern Belize for going on half a century now. A British ex-pat, former liaison with the Maya Indians in Toledo for colonial government, retired citrus farmer, ardent do-gooder hater, it is always great to see him again when I get here. I stay at his house, which it just up the hill from camp, as we have known each other for fifteen years or so. He runs it as a guesthouse for friends mostly now I think. I gladly pay him the meager sum of $50.00 a week. Having my own bathroom is more than worth the price of admission and putting a bit of extra money in his pocket good.

I got my phone working, found that high-speed Internet was at one of our favorite local bars, which had reopened after closing for a couple of years, contact with home was secured, beers were had, more catching up ensued and then dinner and to bed after a discussion of the merits and drawbacks of screening dirt with respect to efficiency and archaeological rigor. Sleep came easily.

16MAY2011

Got up very early, snarfed leftover frittata from Sunday brunch; a potato-heavy, bacon and horseradish cheesy delight that sat in my stomach like led in a good way as I figured on little food options for quite a while. Turned out the early start was a bit later than it should have been, but I made it to the gate in time and was off. Just before getting to Miami the captain announced that if we looked off to the left of the plane, fortunately the side I was on at a window, we could see the space shuttle taking off. It was the first launch I had ever seen live and although seeing it from that vantage point was cool, it was way more cool than spectacular-mostly because it was way fucking cool! The canceled flight to Belize City on the other hand was neither cool nor spectacular.

I wasted the rest of my day contacting the friends I was supposed to meet to get a ride to camp with. Facebook worked surprisingly well. I shot off a group message and before I could send an email to Keith, who I was pretty sure would not get the message through facebook, I was getting responses. Keith even got back to me although he did insist I contact him by phone in the future, as Internet access in Toledo can be problematic and is spotty at best.

Sadly I must say that I wasted my night in Miami sleeping. I took a nap, got some Pizza and beer while hanging out at the hotel bar. The pizza was surprisingly good along with the equally surprisingly Yuengling that was available, chatted with Donna, and pretty much just hit the sack after deciding that the two days I spent in South Beach about a decade ago for Art Deco weekend was a sufficient experience of the place. Had I decided at that point to try and do a travel journal I probably would have made more of an effort to, well travel around a little and find something to write about.

Chris Asked Me a Question

My friend Chris asked me a philosophical question regarding ideas in the book On Free Choice of the Will, in which Augustine takes up many questions about human existence, virtue, and theology. As Chris put it, “one of the more interesting” discussions, and the subject of his query, is why God allows evil. He was passing the question he was asked in class and his answer on to me for comment. I will spare you the entire question and his answer as they are both fairly lengthy and get right to my response.

I am guessing the question you are seeking an answer to is the last sentence, "Why would an all good God make us free to [choose evil]?" I assume that this question was meant to be addressed in an academic fashion, confined to the narrow context of critiquing Augustinian Theodicy and its tenants, base assumptions, development, etc., but your answer, no offence intended, is an attempt to take up and actually answer the thing.

I have never read the book and won’t pretend to be able to address the academic issues at hand. However, I come to this subject with a few issues regarding concepts behind the question in general. First and foremost, to assume that there is a god, good, evil, or indifferent, is a bogus premise. It introduces magic to the discussion, making anything and everything possible. Who decides what the magic powers of god are? It is ridiculous, although it is definitely interesting and telling to examine these issues on a personal level or within a society.

Morality and reality need no god. If one chooses to understand the world through an explanatory model that includes one, or similar concepts, that is fine. I say whatever works. However, the constraints put on behavior are firstly physical, secondly emotional (as in “I cannot bring myself to do that, it grosses me out”), and social. Free will is better discussed, especially with respect to evil acts, in terms of what peoples world view is, what they are capable of conceiving and doing, and how that relates to interactions between individuals and groups. In the abstract we are free to do anything, but really our behavior is greatly constrained by forces outside our direct control and often outside our ability to understand or even notice, but not by anything magical.

A deity can be anything anyone decides it is. What is good? What is evil? Well, I think the cultural relativists are correct about it…it depends. They are big concepts that differ and change from place to place and over time. What does it mean to be a good god and how can people know what a god would think is good? It is a questions rooted in knowledge that is unattainable; mostly because it is make believe (cue Mr. Rogers)

Lets take a quick trolley ride to the land of make believe. Why does King Friday XIII let that witch Lady Elaine continue to exist when witchcraft is the evil work of the devil? Is the king good and what does that mean? How can he be careless and unthinking so often and still be good? Are withes really aligned with the devil and is that an evil that should not be tolerated? To all that I say: For fucks sake they are god damn puppets! They are not real and we just pretend that they have ideas and take actions, so the questions are meaningless. My answer to your question is essentially the same, trite though that may be.

Why would an all good God make us free to choose evil? Dude, god is not real. People decide what a god is, what powers they have, how they interact with the world, and people decide what is good and evil then pretend that the deity is the source of these things. The question is meaningless because the underlying premise is false (or at best useless). Philosophizing about such matters leads to a lot of hypothetical nonsense that in the end comes with the caveat that there is no god anyway and even if there were there is no way to know it. Let’s talk about what a good god means and how that idea works and who uses it and why. Those are the parts of the question that have meaning.

Sorry Chris, I am way too much of a secular humanist to go very far down the religious philosophy road. I may have mentioned this before, but I think it is hard enough just trying to figure out what is and isn’t, good and bad are judgments I would rather not get into.