13 August 2002(Back in the States)
My season ended slightly chaotically, cramming 3 months of lab work into 3 weeks. I came home (to Nashville) yesterday and have just started to unpack and pack for another trip that I'm staying up for tonight. I fly to a friend's wedding (George for the Mac people), then I'll be back in MN this Sunday to next Sunday. Then to start the semester. For those of you are back in MN, email me and we'll get together then. For the rest of you, this is largely irrelevant, but you now know that some wandering band of howler monkeys didn't find and devour me in Guatemala City. At least not yet.

27 June 2002 (Bushwhacking with the Q'eqchi's)
I’m back in civilization and have been for a spell, but it’s been a long hard road to sanity, a process which was only completed by escaping to Antigua for a night and eating gyros and cheesecake.

I got 5 weeks of work in La Caoba, digging a few trashpits behind structures in the site of La Caoba while Sal and Margaret were basically let loose on their own to do caving. In spite of the fact that La Caoba is a small village, my field season was some manner of warped urban archaeology --one of my middens had a friggin’ latrine dug into it (another of my units was actually salvage from another latrine being dug) and another midden was capped by the schoolhouse. I had small children, pigs, dogs, and guinea birds (I think) watching me most of the day. Then I went home and bathed with a basin and a tank of occasionally putrid water while the howler monkeys that lived above camp watched.

It was wonderful and horrible at the same time. The mayor of the village took personal offence that I was there for the first half of the season and did all he could to make my life difficult. This situation was only resolved and my life there in general made easier by the project donating time, money, and a mason to come and repair and finish the town aguada (rain collection pit which had a bit of groundwater seepage from a perched water table), which is rather important because the closest source of water is 2 hours away.

This was actually a big problem for us, since we lived outside of town. We had to send workmen out to get us water--normally 10 gallons for a ½ day’s work. All supplies were brought to within an hour of camp by pickup and then brought by workmen with horses and tumplines (in this part of the world things are often carried on the back held by a rope supported by the forehead). Towards the end most of our fresh food was bought from the villagers--we went through almost 200 lb. of corn for our tortillas and similarly crazy amounts of eggs, beans, and rice. Potatoes, pasta, and fresh fruits and vegetables were luxury items (sometimes the cavers would recon in a place with wild passion fruit vines and we’d celebrate by eating wild passion fruit).

Our first cook had a psycho ex-husband who wanted to kill her, so he would occasionally show up in camp and she would run away and hide. So we always had a workman in camp with her. Which was good in other ways as well--she spoke not a word of Spanish (which might be the secret to great Q’eqchi’ cooks). But my Q’eqchi’ is much better now (and I’m actually trying to write my paper for next month’s symposium directly into Spanish, which seems to be going well ).

Towards the end of the season, when several members of the project had malaria, the mosquitoes had come out in full force, snakes were writing around the camp, and the mud was almost unbearable, the community had a ceremony for the aguada, called a Wa’atesink, which involved torching a giant ball of incense and feeding the only water source in the community with incense, chocolate, and pig and chicken blood (sounds like a bad idea, but they only smeared the outside corners). Then we had a feast at about 2 in the morning with possibly the best pork I’ve ever eaten--an amazing smoked, barbequed, tender chunk of meat in a thick, spicy, chocolaty soup. So good.

I left Caoba eventually, washed my artifacts at Cancuen, did some caving alone in Raxruha, and spent a few days digging a large surface site there. Now I’m back and living the high life--there are movies, bagels, and ceviche down the street, and my fridge is loaded up with gorgonzola. This season’s episodes of Buffy are on a channel from Chile right where I left off, and it doesn’t appear that anything has happened in the news since I disappeared.

Anyway, this is the short version of the most wonderfully horrible and horribly wonderful weeks of my life. Telling the long version will probably involve beer. But it seems to have been a success and I’m going to get more workmen and money for next season, which is possibly the most important thing to have come out of my time there.

1 April 2002 (Night of the Zapotec Horse)
So now I´m in Coban with email and the other three members of the team are going tourist for a week while I go with our cultural anthropologist(s) to remedy the Caoba situation.

Previous to this, I was in El Zapote, the village where David and Avery (cultural anthropologists) are based from which Proyecto Cancuen draws its workmen to excavate the site. It was wonderful--I´ve known these people for a few years now as workers, but we had 2 days of just being in the community. We moved into the old school in front of the soccer field, which is also used by grazing animals, and ate in people´s houses and went to Semana Santa (Holy Week) festivities.

We arrived Wednesday after dark and set about trying to find food, which was scarse to come by at first--6 cold, hard tortillas which a family was saving to throw to the pigs. We tried again and a friend of David´s opened his tienda (store) and we got a small packaged feast of sardines, crackers, and cookies along with a large pile of less cold and hard tortillas, which we devoured, leaving the original 6 tortillas underneath the hammock I´d set up near the door, then went to sleep to the sound of the horse outside eating grass.

I woke up in the middle of the night (confused as I normally am when I´m in a new place) and assumed (per usual again) that I´d somehow fallen asleep in a cave, and proceeded to panic. I didn´t have my glasses on, but through "formations" (in actuality my mosquito net) I saw a very large shape moving towards me in the moonlight making rather loud walking and munching noises, which didn´t help the situation much. After a fair amount of swearing and cowering, I realized that I was in a hammock, and set about trying to figure out excactly where I was. David, who was next to me in another hammock and who had been observing my panic in proper anthropological format finally deigned to clue me in, at which point I realized that there was a horse eating the 6 cold, hard tortillas under my hammock and shushed it out. David closed the door a bit more firmly and we all went to sleep.

I found out the next morning that Amalia, one of the cavers who was also in a hammock, saw black hoofed legs enter the room in the moonlight when she was half-asleep and thought to herself "it´s either the horse or Brent has turned into Satan" (I guess that gives me an insight into how others view me as boss), then observed my same panicked situation that seemed to amuse David and everyone from Zapote.

Before all of this, however, I was working designing a tourist route in a few amazing caves that have newly-discovered paintings, lots of archaeology, and 4 different altars that are in use by the present inhabitants of the area in their ceremonies. It´s cool stuff.

Anyway, that´s a rather long ramble. I´ll be in Guate by the weekend then back out into this part of the world on Sunday to hopefully start work in La Caoba. Hope all´s going well. If there´s any news, send it my way.

24 February 2002 (Central America: Where Novelty T-shirts and School Busses go to Die
I was wandering around Coban today I ran across a very old Maya man with a t-shirt saying "Sex Instructor and the First Lesson’s Free!" Last year, the shirts had an Iraq theme, as the Gulf War memorabilia had recently been subjected to spring cleaning and shipped down to the "ropa americana' (American clothing) stores in every town in Guatemala. My two favorites were "Fuck Iraq" and a picture of Iraq separated from Kuwait by a dotted line with a big American flag rammed into it, bordered by the words "These Colors Don’t Bleed." When riding around in chicken busses I look for any words I might have written on the seats when I was in junior high.

Last weekend I made the hike out to La Caoba, the village I work with near the caves. We left Coban (where I’m studying Q’eqchi’, a city located half way between Guatemala City and the site) Saturday afternoon, and got to El Pato, which is one of the many recently-settled colonies in the Guatemalan lowlands, meaning that there are people from all over Guatemala and parts of Mexico. There are nice shops with everything one could possibly need, including bicycles, water tanks, bread, meat, and canned goods, and there’s a telephone office there that works by satellite with a generator, as there’s no electricity there. In order to get to the site from El Pato, we either have to take a boat and then walk 2 hours or get permission to drive through a private road owned by Aceite Olmeca, a palm oil company with a huge African palm finca there. We chose the latter option, but by the time we tracked down Engineer #1 through Engineer #2 (the gatekeeper’s walkie-talkie had died) and got permission, the ferryman had already gone home. Engineer #1 had the ferryman come to work on Sunday especially for us, though, so we got to spend the night in a "hotel," which was actually just a couple of rooms behind a store with very big spiders inside a yard filled with pig manure. The bathroom was a shack with a cement ring to sit on littered with dirty scraps of paper, all in all probably the worst place I’ve ever stayed in. And I’ve stayed in some pretty disgusting places.

Sunday we drove into the finca and promptly got lost, eventually finding the way to the ferry. The ferry itself is actually a big barge-like thing attached by a rope to a large canoe with a giant motor, which the ferryman uses to propel the ferry to the opposite bank, pushing against the ferry from the down-river side.

It turned out that there was a fiesta in La Caoba for opening up a new health clinic. Surprisingly enough, there was a gringa there, a nurse who works for an organization called Concern America and has spent the last five years traveling around the region healing people. Returning there and looking around and talking to her, I realized how badly off the village is. What I thought was a well was actually only a big cement tank to collect rainwater, which the pigs use regularly as a bath and which dries up shortly after the rainy season ends (which is when I’m going to be there). The community is 3 km. uphill from the nearest source of water. It’s basically impossible for them to build a well, since the water table’s really low and is located inside underground caves that crisscross underground and not in a normal soil water table.

The community split off from another nearby one about 20 years ago and moved into empty land which no one owned. And no one owns it yet. They have to pay 130,000 quetzales (almost $20,000) to get a surveyor out to map people’s parcels of land (about .5 sq. km each), which they then have 10 years to pay off. At which point they can start to pay off their land, which costs about Q18,000, or $2500 apiece.

The people have no generator, which is fairly common so that the church can have electric lights and the people giving the sermons can have a microphone, nor do they have a road (the Aceite Olmeca road stops an hour from them but doesn’t have through traffic), and the nearest river is 2 hours away. We managed to get permission to drive through the palm finca and walked the last hour to the village, which was rather difficult as it was pure mud. Luckily they only have to deal with that for about another week or so, at which point the rain will stop, giving them a much easier trip to the water source as soon as their water dries up. When we went there, a lot of the kids had big patches of jungle rot on their feet (a fungus that turns your skin black and soggy and rather hurts) and some of the babies had sores. The infant mortality rate in this area averages about 50%, but this is one of the worst-off communities in the region, so I would expect that it would be much higher.

I met with the gringa here in Coban yesterday, and her organization has ties here in Guatemala with the cruz roja (Red Cross) and the Catholic church. We’re associated with a different part of the Catholic church called Telita Kumi, USAID, the Peace Corps, and a few government organizations here in Guatemala which were created after the peace accords to help out the communities that the military didn’t massacre during the war. Right now, the community would have to go through the two of us for any assistance since their committee (basically the community’s governing body) isn’t legally recognized, which hopefully we can help to change this season.

We left without finalizing a deal with the community for me to work there this year, as they want 2x what we can pay them, which is 5x what they could get anyplace else in the region. So I’m going to have to go back, and hopefully come with news about how we can help to develop the community starting this year. They weren’t angry, though. They gave us tamales stuffed with pork, chile, and tomato sauce with chocolate to drink, which they made for their fiesta. Then we turned around and headed back to the car.

Hopefully all will go well the next time. The Q’eqchi’ communities we work with negotiate like this, so we should get permission from them the next time we go in or definitely the time after that. Business takes a while, since decision- making is based on consensus and not majority rules (also, when I was speaking I had a translator into Q’eqchi’, since mine’s not good enough to lead a meeting yet of course, and I discovered that when I was asking if there were any questions I was also asking if there was anything they wanted to ask for.).

Since I’m going to start work there as soon as I get permission from them, if I don’t send off another email it means that I’m working there, and should resurface sometime in June or July. If any of you want to get ahold of me, you can do so before March 7 through this email address, as I’ll be coming and going from the city until then.

All right. I think that this has been long enough. Hope that all’s going well with all of you, and if you get a chance send me news from your worlds, as I won’t be able to hear from all of you again for a while.

10 February 2002 (Sleepless in Guatemala City)
finally got to Guatemala Friday night. We drove through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (just south of the Gulf, in the skinny part of Mexico) on Thursday, where the wind has a tendency to knock over cars (it's a wind tunnel, as it is the only break in the mountains separating the Atlantic and Pacific this side of Panama.

We woke up early Friday morning and drove without eating until after dark, when we finally rolled into Guatemala City. To find that we had to go to site Saturday for a ritual done by the workmen. So we ate dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant here and woke up early for the 7 hour drive to the portage where a boat would be waiting for us to take us to the village of El Zapote. The ritual started at 8, ended at 1 in the morning, and we got into our hotel (the camp's not set up yet this season) at 3.30 in the morning. Then we drove back to Guate today for a day of organizing. I'm moving up to central Guatemala on Wednesday to start to learn Q'eqchi' Maya, and heading into my site, La Caoba, on Saturday to warn them about the influx of archaeologists in just a few weeks.

Anyway, it feels good to be back home in Guatemala City. Crossing the border was wonderful, and in the past few days it's hit me really hard that I'm back here, which makes me so happy. So, things that I've noticed since I've been back that give me a warm, gooshy feeling:

-pigs on the border
-a dead horse on the road
-advertisements for Gallo (the name of both the national beer and the national soap. Mmmm.)
-speed bumps and potholes
-t-shirts of Van Damme and Chuck Norris
-2/3 of the radio stations are ranchero (Tex-Mex), the rest are marimba, soccer, and bad pop
-dynamited patches of hillside and mountain around roads with no attempt of stabilization
-diesel exhaust as another atmospheric layer
-the 4 food groups--eggs, beans, corn, and dairy
-pickups with 30 passengers
-off-key hymns in the church (including one to the tune of "Blowin' in the Wind." No joke.)
-smell of copal incense
-squacking of parrots
-burning piles of trash along the highway
-scattered trash along the highway
-barbed wire
-the taste of warm, fresh tortillas
-the stars (I forget that there are so many)
-the bus that passes you continually and then stops to let out passengers (we did a double helix with one for about 30 miles)
-the virtually total sponsorship of the country by Pepsi, Coke, Crush, and different political parties
-slow-moving trucks on bumpy, pot-hole-ridden, windy mountain roads.
-a goat on the highway
-electrical wires going through thatch roofs
-the hum of an electric generator

Anyway, this one's long and rambling. But I'm excited. This is the first time I've been able to check internet since Papantla on Wednesday night.

4 February 2002 (Nearer the Road)
Anyway, the car's almost fixed, so we're out of Dallas tonight. We'll be spending the night on the border and then crossing over early tomorrow morning.

1 February 2002 (Near the Road)
I'm writing you from a fleabag motel in Dallas, where we're stranded until Monday. We drove all the way here yesterday without incident and then pulled off of the freeway to get dinner when we realized that 1st gear doesn't work. On the way to the mechanic today we realized that 3rd and 5th don't either. So we're shelling out for a new transmission.

Tonight is our last night of full-frontal Americana--wedged in between giant clusters of ramp, amid the Waffle Houses, Chubby's, and Tex-Mex restaurants next to the exit ramp for Interstate 35E is our small hotel room in the Spanish Trails Motel. Tomorrow we move into a studio in Dallas owned by a friend of Avery's who is leaving town for the weekend.

If any of you know someplace fun in Dallas, send me your suggestions and I'll probably check it out, as we've got nothing else to do.

Anyway, the transmission was the only thing we were worried about, so hopefully this will end the problems we have with the car. ETA for Guatemala is now probably Thursday.

Hope all is going better (or just going, unlike all ofthis sitting still) with all of you.

7 January 2002 (lectures)
This message is directed to all of you on this list fortunate enough to live in the little slice of icy paradise known as the Twin Cities. If any of you are interested, I'll be giving 2 lectures this week for the Maya Society of Minnesota. Friday night at 7.30 I'll be talking about general stuff about Cancuen, and Saturday morning from 9 'til noon I'll be talking about my cave research, the development project, and how to put together cave maps (and some surface stuff) to figure out how space was used for ritual purposes. Both are at Hamline in Giddens Learning Center, which is on the southwest corner of Snelling and Hewitt in St. Paul.

13 June 2001 (The End of the Season)
I'm back in Guatemala City and the field season has ended. We were finally drowned out, and the last night we were there the rain was coming in horizontally into each of our champas (which are only roofs--no walls). The generator, which used to be about 15 feet above the river, was moved all the way into camp because in 3 days of rain the river started to enter the generator shed.

Before all of this happened, however, Juan and I went off to the village of La Caoba, which is the site of a giant cluster of natural hills swiss-cheesed with caves that you can see from Cancuen and camp. We came back with 2 Protoclassic (about 200 CE) mushroom pots in an undisturbed cache in one of the caves, a map, lots of information, a camp and personnel set up for next year (I'm going to be running my own camp in a new La Caoba cave sub-project which will be my dissertation), and worms that are actually the larval stage of a type of flea called a nigua in our toes. Which later had to be removed in a hospital. We're in the process of turning the whole region of hills, which covers at least 3 different villages, into a national park.

This season was a season of visitors. We got the chancellor and lots of the board of trust of Vanderbilt to come, along with the owner of Holiday Inn. Humberto Che, head of Fondapaz, Q'eqchi Maya politician, and probable future president of Guatemala, came with a Frenchman who's giving us lots of money via helicopter. We spent the previous few days looking for the perfect helicopter landing place, which turned out to be a patch of high land near the thatch hut of the guy who manages the farm we stay on.

It's a cow and sheepgoat pasture, so we had to make a barbed-wire circle around the white lime helicopter circle and cross landing pad. Fondapaz, which is giving money to the Cancuen community development project, is the Guatemalan government's way of apologizing for the attempted genocide by channeling money into building up the villages that survived.

We also got a journalist from the San Francisco Chronicle and the founder of "Children of the Dump," with 2 of the children making a documentary.

I ended up spending most of the season mapping, as our mapper couldn't come down this year, so I learned how to map, how to use a total station, and, more recently, how to use AutoCAD. I have spent the past week back in the lab house putting in up to 14 hour days trying to finish the map, which is now done.

18 April 2001 (Return to Civilization)
After almost 2 months in the middle of nowhere, I have returned to prepare for a conference in New Orleans.

I'm in Guatemala City right now and amazed by the contradictions in this country. This is the largest metropolis in Central America, home to monumental architecture and obsene wealth. On Saturday and Sunday we were in the town of El Zapote, which is where our workers are from, where people die for a hobby. There is one building made of cement, the sometimes-in-use school (depending on whether there is a teacher available to teach elementary school). Two days ago I was dealing with the cooks accusing the laundry ladies of stealing soap and yesterday I was dealing with the municipal water beaurocracy--our newly-purchased water meter was stolen during Semanta Santa so we had to get another at the same time that we contested the bill. I discovered that I am much better at understanding campesino (rural) Spanish than I am the Spanish in the capitol.

In El Zapote have the church hooked up to a generator so that there is some light for their 5 hour Easter eve service (which had about 30 sleeping children in the aisle and under the altar along with several rather malnourished dogs). But it was an amazing experience--the service was what they perform for themselves, not some show, and it was a wonderful synergy of indigenous beliefs and Catholicism. At the end of the service we all had a meal of pig soup (one had been slaughtered before we got there) with tamal and chocolate to drink, then we went out and lit the fireworks that we brought.

The day we left, I was trying to fix my tent when I felt an intense surge of pain in my fingers. I'd just brushed against a yellow fuzzy caterpillar of the neurotoxin variety. I ran clutching my arm through camp (the pain quickly spread past my wrist) to go to the nearest wash basin. Which was empty. So I grabbed the soap and ran through the kitchen and eventually cleaned it off.

Several teaspoons of sugar (blocking the effects of the neurotoxin, or combating the venom of the worm, as the cooks' mom said), some topical and oral Benedryl, and several asprins later, my hand was basically dead and feeling sprained. The locals say that it has electricity in it, and the neurotoxin feels l ike a strong electrical shock through the effected parts.

But I'm here and in one piece, which is nice, and my left hand is up to maximum potential. I hope that all of you can say the same.

Working for the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project/Western Belize Regional Cave Project
26 July 2000 (Oops)
I took this week off from archaeology to go to the Maya archaeology simposio in Guatemala City this week, and had been looking forward to it for several months. So on Sunday, I taxied to Flores, Guatemala from the border with Belize, and bought a plane ticket, planning to stay until Saturday or Sunday.

Nikolai Grube, one of the best epigraphers (Maya glyph people) in the world, showed up at the airport as well, and we talked. We took the same flight to Guatemala, and about 1/2 way there, he told me that he was confused: "I was pretty sure that the Simposio was last veek. But I was probably wrong." Suddenly, the email message from Arthur's wife telling me that I had misunderstood and that the conference was THIS Monday (I was in the field all last week, so although she sent it on Sunday, I didn't get it until Saturday, and though that THIS Monday was the following Monday). So I got to the Cancuen house, and it was indeed last week.

So, I hung out with the other Vanderbilt graduate students Sunday and Monday. On Monday, I ate bagel sandwiches and had unbelievable sushi. I also had great coffee in an upscale mall in the rich part of the city called Gourmet Center. I tweaked out--over a month in the jungle or in small Belizean towns followed by time in the largest metropolis in Central America, in a mall with neon lights, nutrition stores, well-dressed people, and I freaked out and ran back to the quietude of the lab house. Then had sushi. After going to Antigua to pick up brownies for all of my poor, suffering fellow staff- members eating rice and beans and nothing else.

I hung out with the other students until around 2.30 on Monday night, and on Tuesday morning (after I had gotten up at 5.30) had a hard time finding a cab. So I got to the airport late, and they refused to admit me. Then they had a change of heart and put me on the plane in the only available seat remeaining--in first class. I got back to Belize and worked at Cahal Pech (one of the sites which is right next to our hotel) all day. I had trouble sleeping last night, and worked all day again today, so am nearing the passing-out point.

Now I will finish shopping downtown, go eat dinner, then take a nap. Tomorrow I leave with a friend to Sayaxche, Guatemala , to see the sites that Vanderbilt was working on Before Cancuen, the sites around Lago Petexbatun. Then back to Barton Creek for the last week.

I've been working on 2 housemounds out at Barton Creek, piles of granite river cobbles, one of which has been invaded by fire ants, the other of which is a mess. Two hippies from the '60's, Jim and Nancy, built a house on top of it. Then it's been heavily looted and been bulldozed for fill for the land-owner's new house. Next week, I get to finish them off, then move back into the cave for a few days before the season ends.

Ah well, enough for now.

16 July 2000 (travels)
Anyway, back from my whirlwind trip through Chiapas and Guatemala, and a week back at Barton Creek.

When we went back to Mexico, we had to sneak in, sort of. The border crossing was closed so we had to check in at Palenque.

Apparently, a new $20 exit fee has been introduced in Mexico as well, which has to be paid to a bank. No one told us about this. We bribed our way out of the country, as there were no open banks within an hour of where we were leaving from. Exciting.

In Palenque, the howler monkeys are finally back after a plague had killed most of them off several years ago. And I got to see a mule in Izapa. I'd never seen a mule before, and that was really cool too--a site near the Pacific that shows the transition from Pre-Maya to Maya traditions.

This week at camp we had a batch of new students, and I spent the week digging with 2 of them at a time in a housemound under the sun. The mound has a few artifacts and no discernable architecture, which makes digging it hard--normally it's easy to tell what the earlier construction phases are because they have nice walls and floors, but this is one big jumble of big rocks and small rocks and medium-sized rocks with a few sherds. We are trying to get a chronology of the settlement outside of Barton Creek Cave to compare with the chronology of the ceremonies inside of the cave.

Well, that's about it. I'm going back out to the site tomorrow, then head off for Guatemala City next weekend to attend the Simposio on Maya archaeology there.

2 July 2000 (the funk)
I got a bit of the stomach funk this past week at camp, which was not very fun. So the last night of the session was very mellow--went to bed at about 10.00. Missed a lot of the party.

But that was good, as my friends, John and Errin, and I had to get to the Guatemalan border with Mexico yesterday. We stayed in a hotel a good 2 km outside of the frontier town of Bethel that was on the ruins of a yet-unnamed Maya ruin. Tame spider monkeys kept us company outside, and the howler monkeys serenaded us in the distance. They were happy to have archaeologists come to the hotel, and today, Jon and I did cave recon and Errin did a simple (pace and compass) map. Then a river trip to breakfast in Mexico and a morning at the Maya ruins of Yaxchilan, following by an illegal entry into Mexico, (the immigration office on the border was closed, so it wasn't until I got to Palenque, that I was able to get a visa. We had no pesos . . . rather, we had $5 worth of pesos given at a bad exchange rate, and the one money-changer in town wouldn't accept our other bills, as one had a micro-tear and 2 had blemishes. But the driver of the shuttle to Palenque was more than happy to take dollars and we all now have pesos.

Tomorrow, we go to Palenque ruinas, which I haven't been to for 2 years. Yeah! Then San Cristobal and Tonina and Izapa on our way back to the border.

That's about it. It's really rather exciting, but I'm close to falling asleep, which is good for dampening exhuberance. Ah well.

~20 June 2000 (the plug)
Sorry I haven't written for a while--been out in the jungle or crammed for time.

My second week of digging found me in town working at the site of Cahal Pech. I was planning to return to Barton Creek Cave but had some sort of last minute switch, which was depressing, but working for a week on the most elite plaza at the site was a nice break from the Underworld. The puzzle from the week was this: there were three mounds in a semi-circle abutting a large pyramid to the east, with a small entrance to the courtyard in the middle from the south-east. the north mound had a plaster floor outside of the NW corner of it, and the last 1.5m to the NW was lower than the rest. Why?

My supervisor decided to dig to find out, figuring that there was a 2nd entrance to this plaza that was eventually closed off. As this plaza was the most elite around, they didn't want just anyone coming in, and the group to the north would have been just upper-middle class.

He was right, and we dug down through the collapsed roof and part of the wall to a beautiful plastered floor, ceramics, and an ancient bed. Fun stuff.

Then this past week (just 3 days) I was supposed to go to work in a different set of caves, with some hope of ending up back at Barton Creek (where there were projects waiting for me). Fifteen minutes before I was to leave for this camp, I was told that I was returning to Barton Creek. Exciting.

I had my own students this week and was doing my own excavation on my own ledge, digging in a guano pool that was filled with over 1000 sherds in a 60x80x25cm deep hole. Some of the sherds were thirds of whole vessels. Also beads, and hearths for rituals of some sort. It appears that the Maya used it as a place for burning rituals until the hearthstones were covered with ash, at which point another hearth was put in, then another and another.

My student the first day was Lisa from mac, who injured herself on a Guatemalan water slide, so I didn't want her to be over- exerting herself. She did lab work the next day, and I got the 2 students with the worst reputation on the project. 1, who was poycotting the food at camp on the grounds that she couldn't look at another tortilla or more beans and rice. Someone asked her how her day went once last week and she said "the morning was fine but after that it was just digging and digging and digging." When it started to rain as we were going to go into the cave, she asked if we could just wait out the storm. I explained that the canoes were a minute from our hut, that the cave was 50 feet from the canoes, and that we were working in a natural rain shelter. She pouted. The other, 2, is just young.

The morning was fine. 1 was screening what 2 was digging. I was shuffling papers (archaeology is actually paperwork in a beautiful, makeshift office). Then, in the afternoon, 1 got noseous and took a nap. When sh woke up, 2 had decided that it was too buggy in the cave (there are small insects that are attracted to our lights) and sprayed 100% DEET all over her face, getting some in her eye. 1 and I took turns digging while 2 flushed.

We quit early that day.

Then, Wednesday, 1 was grumpy and mumbled about how difficult the work is and (I'm assuming) about how mean I am. But the unit is finished and now I just have t omap the area around it. Provided I stay at Barton Creek all summer, I will be their official excavator. Whoo-hoo.

Now, I am staying at the Tropical Paradise Hotel on Caye Caulker, taking a break from reading and listening to music on the beach, the Caribbean gently rolling and the second-largest barrier reef in the world breaking waves in the distance. I'm waiting until I get hungry, at which point I will feast on lobster and conch. It's a really busy day.

9 June 2000 (Life in the Caves)
So, the last week we've been out at camp doin' archaeology. I'm working at a tourist cave on the property of a crazy Canadian who lets us use some thatch structures near the cave mouth.

Here's the typical day:

Roll out of the hammock at about 6.45 (sometimes the howler monkeys are out. Other times one of the resident dogs of puppies tries to eat my mosquito netting.
Eat at 7.
Put on my wet, smelly work clothes as late as possible.
Get into a canoe at about 7.30, and canoe the 10 minutes to the dropp-off point at ledge 7. Usually, I go back and pick up the rest of teh people. then, I climb to the top of ledge 7 (a very easy series of "steps") and get ready to rappel onto a natural bridge that crosses the river.
Rappel down to the bridge and walk over to ledge 8.

There we are mapping and working on artifact typologies, and recording all the data we can. The whole area's been very heavily looted and so everything has been moved around a lot. We have found an old shovel and the top of a canteen.

We break for about 20 minutes for lunch, peanut butter and jelly on tortillas, chips, and a piece of candy, and then continue to work, except for when tourists come. Then we have to be very quiet and sort of out of the way. We have lights set up in the ledge we are working on, and a canoe nearby, so it's fairly obvious that we are working up there.

At about 4.00 or 4.30, we pack up, go back to the bridge, and rappel down to the canoe. Then we go back to camp, bathe in the pool formed by the river at the mouth of the cave, and then relax.

Fun stuff.

28 May 2000 (post offices without envelopes and closed museums)
So . . . life in Guatemala is looking good. I went to meet another Vandy prof, Ted Fischer, on Wednesday staying up in Tecpan, near the ruins of Iximche, the Late Postclassic site of the Kaqchikel kingdom. I ate at a German restaurant with his family and another grad student in cultural anthropology from Tualane who's working with Ted. On Thursday, I went to eat dinner with Arthhur's family, and we had good beek and potatoes (not sushi). On the way I ran into someone who graduated from Macalester with me.

On Friday I was the currier for Arthur, bringing 2 of the wonderful figurines that were found at Cancuen (1 is a shaman with a conical witch's hat that is removable and has pseudoglyphs that look like stars and moons, as well as a jaguar tail coming out of his back. The other is a warrior with a round shield and a removable jaguar helmet. It's also a whistle.). Then I picked up my friend Jon from the airport.

Yesterday, we experienced another one of the things that warms my heart when thinking about Guatemala, along with post offices that don't sell envelopes--the museums are basically closed on weekends. We struck out on 2 of the 3 museums we visited, and the third was closed for lunch.

Afterwards, we went to visit Arthur to see the figurines and a National Geographic photo-shoot, and ended up spending the day reconstructing figurines and bowels imported to Cancuen from Palenque. We've pushed the Copan trip another day to help out again this afternoon.

As a reward, we ate Mongolian barbeque at a restaurant down the street from the lab house. Mmmm . . . food cooked on a big, hot table.

23 May 2000 (snake oil and giant heads)
The latest from deep in the heart of the tierra fria (it's really cold up here in the mountains when it rains).

Today I went to Santa Lucia Cotzamalguapa (not cold--it's lowland) to check out some non- Maya Guatemalan archaeology. It's about 1.5 hours from Antigua by bus. There are three sites outside of the town, 2 in sugar farms and one in a sugar-processing plant. The driver who took me there had mastered driving without a running engine, made easier by the hilly terrain and the fact that his car's key-ignition had been disabled. Instead, there is a small button between the steering wheel and the radio that has to be pushed a lot to get the car to start. Also, there is apparently a lot of pumping of the breaks involved.

After visiting the museums on the properties of 2 of the three sites (the three sites have been incorporated into 2 museums), I went off to another town nearby, La Democracia, famous for a lot of Olmecoid collosal heads and big fat guys, all hanging out around the central park, the parque central arqueologico.

Once again, there were many snake oil venders on the very local busses--a woman selling mint -flavored mouthwash as a salve to cure arthritis, inflammed nerves, and any other thing that a topical ointment could possibly heal. The man sold something like Vick's Vap-O-Rub, except that it cures fevers, too.

Ah, fun stuff. When I got back to Guatemala City, I saw an image that kind of explains Guatemala--a very pretty Valentine's heart with the phrase "feliz dia" (have a nice day) inside of it, and a very mean-looking armed guard with a semi-automatic rifle in his hands, with swirls of deisel exhaust clouding the space between the scene and me. Also, I have yet to explain the juxtaposition of sillhouettes of scantilly-clad women with crucifixes and stickers proclaiming an undying love for Jesus. Sometimes its best not to ask.

Tomorrow I meet another of my future professors on the way to the not-so-ancient city of Iximche, the Kaqchikel capital that was conquered by the Spaniards after they broke their alliance. Then Thursday, I meet Arthur's wife and eat sushi at one of the only safe sushi restaurants in the Third World (hopefully), the Friday I meet up with a friend of mine from the caves, Jon.

Should be fun.

21 May 2000 (To Cancuen and Back Again)
Last Saturday I left to go and meet the Vanderbilt crew. We were going to meet up at a town called Raxruha (Rash-ru-HA), and I had a vague idea of how to get there. So, I left Antigua at 6.30, catching the bus at the beginning of its rounds. The 45-minute trip to Guatemala city lasted for over an hour, and when my bus broke down at the fringe of the city, I took a cab to the bus terminal to go to my next stop, Coban.

4.5 hours later, I arrived at Coban (the time being 12.30). I found out that the last bus to Raxruha had already left, so I ran around frantically trying to find a pickup to take me the 4.5 hour ride. No one was biting. But I heard a rumour that the pickups in Chisec, a town 2.5 hours away, had friendly pickup drivers. So I hopped a little bus and watched as snake- oil sellers after snake-oil seller sold snake-oil in various forms--pills, mostly. As the pitches were in Q'eqchi', I understood little of what the supposed benefits of these pills were, except that one was good for memory and one makes you stronger.

In Chisec, I found a pickup to take me to Raxruha. 2 hours later, I got there, only to find that the company had already left. After meeting the guy who owns the property the archaeologists stay on, though, he got me another pickup to take me to the camp, an hour away. 15 minutes into it, the heavens opened up. Then (luckily), .5 km from the camp, the driver chickened out and we sloshed the rest of the way, through mud and water buffaloes.

Meanwhile, the Vanderbilt people saw our lights, and were shouting my name, wondering who could be sloshing through mud and water buffaloes through this kind of rain. One of the students got a boat and picked me up (the camp is across the Rio Pasion).

When I got there, my graduate advisor Arthur took me to his porch and gave me a towel and two fingers of a $100 bottle of scotch. As an archaeologist's family from Guatemala city had beaten me there by a few hours, there was cold pizza too.

I ended up staying for 6 days instead of 3, helping in the lab and in the filed, but as the rain had basically paralyzed the crew, there was little to do as of yesterday, so I left, this time riding back into Raxruha and taking a bus into Coban.

The strangest thing--Raxruha is about 3 hours from the nearest paved road, but they have super empanadas that are actually really good samosas. I learn not to question, just accept. Next door is a telefono comunitario that has a fax machine. This is about 1/2 of the businesses in town.

Anyway, the crew for the site, incidentially called Cancuen, is composed of Arthur, the man in charge; Guichol, the artist; 5 grad students; a Smithsonian person; and 2 undergrads from the Universidad del Valle in Guatemala City. Each of us has a tent under our own thatched huts and a hammock. We have the 2 best cooks from the neighboring town and 2 women who come every other day to wash clothes. All of the men 18 and up from the neighboring town come and dig with us.

We work 7 days a week, next year starting in mid-February and ending in mid-to-late May, when we will move to Guatemala City until August to do lab work.

The guy working on the glyphs right now is a Guatemalan named Federico, and I will meet him when I go through Guatemala City in July at Arthur's.

Last thing: the site

Cancuen is one of the last giant sites in the Maya area about which basically nothing is known. The palace in the site is the same size as the central acropolis at Tikal (which is big), although much denser. Instead of the usual structure-layer of rubble-structure method of building newer buildings on top of old, there is solid, beautiful masonry. Each of the chambers (there are at least 50) is about 7 meters tall. The site has not been excavated, and, more importantly, the few looters who have been to the site, including the Guatemalan army, have been compplete idiots who dug trenches in the wrong places and gave up easily.

Strangest of all, there are no pyramids at the site. Arthur figured out why--there are many karst towers with caves inside of them a few kilometers away, and what is turing out to be one of the best caves in the Maya area, the Candelaria caves. There are structres, murals, and figurines from Cancuen (which, for the archaeologists reading this, put Jaina to shame--I've seen some and they are unbelievable).

The lack of temples means that the rulers could focus more upon commerce, and focus they did --the site is probably going to turn into the richest of all. The rulers of sites, called ajaws, often have a glyph after their names saying so-and-so, holy lord of Tikal. These ajaws have 2 of them--holy lord of Cancuen, holy lord of Machaquila. Machaquila, also unexcavated, lies to the west, on about the same latitude. The two sites thus effectively control the a large stretch of the interface between the highlands and lowlands. All trade coming between the two areas had to pass through the kingdom. These ajaws were well-off.

Anyway, I have only a few days left of travelling alone again--on the 26th, a friend of mine from the caves, John Spendard, comes into Guatemala City and we head into Copan in Honduras and then up to southern Belize. Exciting stuff.

10 April 2000 (travels and travails)
I'm back in Guatemala after an extended visit to Belize. George flew into the airport in Guatemala City last Friday, and we spent the night in Antigua. We flew the next morning from Guatemala City to Flores (in the middle of athe northern part of the country), then arranged a driver for 2 days--Flores to the monster archaeological site of Tikal, where we slept in hammocks and were awoken before dawn by howler monkeys, walked to the site, and sat around and watched spider monkeys playing on trees above ruins with the sun rising in the background and macaws and toucans flying around. Then, we drove through the site to another old site called Uaxactun (wa-shak-TOON), and then a ride back to Flores. From there, we caught a chicken bus to capacity and went to the border with Belize. We spent the night in Cayo, the town I lived in with the cave people when I wasn't in the jungle, actually sleeping in the same hotel as before, which was nice. Then, we went out to one of the cayes off of the shore of Belize, and 1 night turned into 2. We returned mainland to visit a cave I worked in--2 hours by car and 1 by foot each way, spending 5 hours in the cave swimming and crawling and scaling and squeezing. Then we ate Sri Lankan food and crashed. The next day, we rented an Izuzu Trooper and drove to another archaoelogical site and the Rainforest Medicine Trail, which is a collection of plants from all over Belize. We crossed over the border, took a chicken bus to Flores (with several chickens staring at us for most of the way, and the bus constantly swerving to avoid the horses and pigs in the road), and spent the night there. Today, we flew from Flores to Guatemala City, and took a four hour bus ride to Panajachel, a town on the shore of a giant crater lake surrounded by volcanoes. We ran to a market near by, one of the best in Central America, at a town called Solola, and 13 or so textiles later, we returned to the hotel, found an internet place, and that brings me up to the present.

Tomorrow, we go across the lake and hang out at another town, then go to Antigua. Sunday he goes home, and monday I go to Jocotan to study my Ch'orti'. Saturday I meet Arthur. Ah. Fun times in Central America.