Still Alive and Working Away

I just wanted to drop a quick note here to let anyone who's reading this blog that yes, I'm still alive, and our survey is still going strong in the northwest area of the El Pilar Reserve. In fact, the survey is going so strong that I find myself with little time or energy at the end of the day to write. Our docket looks something like this during the week:

0530 - Wake up
0600 - Breakfast
Somewhere between 0630 and 0700 - Fire up the F-350 and head out to El Pilar
0745 - Arrive at the park
0815-0830 - Arrive at our survey area
0830-1500 - Survey and map the heck out of everything we find in our grid squares
1500 - Return to BRASS Base
1600-1700 - Download all GPS data, collect paperwork
1830 - Dinner
1900 - Video chat with my partner and our son
1930 - Continue work on digitizing our maps in the project GIS and plan strategy for the next day
...Sleep?

It's a pretty demanding schedule, and we recently lost James - who was handling our GPS downloading and a lot of our digitizing procedures - to another project. We may have someone interested in taking over James' old duties, but its up to me to manage these tasks until he shows up and starts working. So, not a lot of time for writing. I do take detailed notes in the field, however, and I've been thinking about doing some retrospective posts based on those. Until then, here are some points of interest:

1) My team has encountered two barba amarillas - aka the dreaded fer-de-lance - in the past two weeks. Both were juveniles and were dispatched without incident, but it's always a little unsettling to encounter these beasts in the forest. They are uncommonly aggressive for snakes and highly venomous, and their camouflage patterning makes them difficult to see in the leaf litter they typically inhabit. I don't like to kill animals unnecessarily, but we don't take chances with these guys.

2) Our Guatemalan co-director, Paulino, had a run-in with killer bees of the non-Wu-Tang variety last Wednesday. Our survey teams were separated by close to a kilometer when this happened, and he was able to escape the swarm without serious injury. He estimates he was stung over 30 times, mostly on his head and neck, which was not a pleasant experience. We were lucky in having a shortened workweek that gave poor Paulino a chance to recover.

3) We've visited the sites Tikal, Uaxactun, and Lamanai, and attended an archaeological symposium in Santa Elena, Peten, Guatemala. I'll write some more about that later.

4) We finished mapping over 1 square kilometer of what I originally called the Central Supercluster, a concentration of large architectural groupings visible in our LiDAR map. This area contains something on the order of 100 sites - meaning housemounds, temples, platforms, and other cultural features - which is a rather astonishing density. We're still working on getting all this data digitized in the GIS and I'll be able to report on it more completely soon. I'm also thinking of changing the name of this area to the Amatal Supercluster, because the area is full of giant amate (fig) trees.

5) In keeping with my science fiction/astronomical naming convention, we're moving on to survey and map the Kum Expanse. Northwest of the Amatal Supercluster lies the minor center Kum, a complex of temple pyramids, large platforms, and other buildings concentrated in an area of about 6.25 hectares (around 15 and a half acres). Our LiDAR map shows some settlement in between these monumental centers, but much of the area seems curiously blank. We covered some of this ground last Wednesday and found that, indeed, there are mounds in some of the intervening spaces, but we have a lot more work to do to figure out what is going in the curious Expanse surrounding Kum. As we enter our second month, we certainly have our work cut out for us. I only hope that the day-long rain today wasn't a harbinger of things to come.

Farming, Maya style

On the last day of April - seems like a really long time ago, now - we took a little trip with Judge Courtney to the farm of our friend, project consultant, and Master Forest Gardener Narciso Torres. Narciso lives in Santa Familia village, which is pretty close to BRASS Base as the crow flies, but takes around 30 minutes to reach as the truck rumbles over partially paved roads. His house is surrounded by plants and trees that produce all kinds of edible or otherwise useful products - the small, red, and incredibly hot bird peppers being my favorite. He even has a large cacao tree for those in need of a chocolate fix.

In ancient Mesoamerica, money really did grow on trees. Cacao was a medium of exchange.

Cacao beans ready for processing.

A fallen calabash vine at Narciso's house. The bottle gourd is the oldest Mesoamerican domesticate.

Narciso's home garden is definitely something special, but his outfield farm is nothing short of spectacular. He grows and tends a variety of native and non-native crops, trees, and bushes in a mosaic plot that would look unfamiliar to farmers from the Great Plains. After visiting his farm for the first time last year, I could easily pick it out in satellite imagery from Google Earth.

One of these fields is not like the others, one of these fields just isn't the same.

Archaeologists have debated the nature of ancient Maya food production for the better part of a century. I could do a whole series of posts on this topic, and I may in the future, but that's perhaps more context than we need to introduce Narciso's forest garden. His is a traditional Maya form of food production, in the sense that 1) he is Maya, and 2) his farming methods were learned from family members and passed down through generations. I am skeptical of using direct-historic approaches to understanding ancient Maya life - ask anyone who knew me in grad school - but there is an interesting and potentially useful analogue for understanding Maya settlement patterns and subsistence strategies here. The ancient Maya likely practiced a form of infield/outfield agriculture, comprising gardens surrounding the family home and more extensive plots further afield. Outfields are often viewed as large areas cleared with slash-and-burn techniques and planted with one or more staple crops of the Mesoamerican triad - corn, beans, and squash.

This scenario certainly makes sense from a Euro-American agricultural perspective - amber waves of grain and all that. But was it necessarily the case in the Prehispanic Maya Lowlands? Anabel thinks not, and she makes the case with co-author Ronald Nigh in a recent book and an article you can view here among other publications. The forests of the Maya Lowlands are dominated by plants and trees that produce edible, medicinal, or otherwise useful products - think hardwoods for construction, like mahogany, and palms for roof thatching - and the ancient Maya were intimately familiar with these resources. Outfields could have been guided through a managed form of ecological succession to maximize both food output and production of other necessities, and contemporary forest gardens provide a model for testing with archaeological materials. With that in mind, let's take a trip through Narciso's farm and see what a forest garden looks like today.

You're not farming in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.

The casual traveler entering Narciso's farm would probably think they'd walked onto a patch of fallow land. Parts of it are overgrown. There are trees aplenty. The whole plot is not given over to orderly rows of corn, soybeans, sorghum, or wheat. This ain't Iowa...but a farm it is. Some areas are not currently in use for growing crops, but the entire plot is a managed mosaic of shrubs, trees, and cultigens. Narciso has even built a small structure since I visited last year.

This small field shelter, made of reclaimed materials, was not here last year. It makes me wonder about a lot of the solitary mounds we find in survey around El Pilar.

Spot the sherds! Late Classic
overburden edition.

Amazing technicolor maize.

Narciso had some pretty interesting things inside his field hut, including loads of ancient sherds he's found while removing rocks from areas he wants to plant. This is not surprising, as a number of mounds are clearly visible in the plowed fields that border his farm. Ancient Maya settlement covered this area, and a large temple complex - called Bacab Na by Anabel when she rediscovered it in the 1980s - lies nearby. Narciso also had some indigenous corn stored in this structure from the last harvest.

A custard apple bears little resemblance
to your standard Golden Delicious.

A ripe cashew. You can eat the fruit as is,
but the nut requires some processing.

As you walk down a path through the relatively open southern section of the farm, you pass a number of fruit-bearing trees. Narciso assiduously tends them by pruning, clearing weeds, and harvesting fruit as needed. The trees in turn provide shade and mulch, which help keep the ground moist during the hot dry season and replenish nutrients in the soil. Moving further into the farm, we come across a small section that may look more familiar.

Sweet potatoes planted in rows blend seamlessly into the rest of the forest garden.

The "thin," "fragile" soils of tropical Central America have been decried by agriculturalists and archaeologists alike for decades. Scholars have spilled gallons of ink debating how the cultural achievements of the ancient Maya could have arisen from such a shaky agricultural base. But as Anabel and some others point out, there is nothing fragile about tropical soils if traditional methods of hand cultivation and managed succession are used to produce food. Soil degradation becomes a problem when people introduce technologies developed outside the tropical landscape - such as the horse/ox-drawn plow brought by the Spanish during their conquest and colonization of Mesoamerica. The plow works very well in other areas of the world, but its historic and contemporary use in the Maya Lowlands, along with the alien practice of converting forest to pasture for non-indigenous animals, has led to erosion and decreased soil fertility in many areas. Ancient Maya society developed over several millennia of occupation in the Central American tropical forests, and the techniques the Maya created to extract resources from their environment provide a model for sustainable agriculture today.

A pathway through the canopy.

The group enters the forested area.

Moving north through Narciso's farm, we enter a more forested area dominated by larger trees. These trees act as true solar collectors - the temperature was a balmy 102 degrees Fahrenheit (~ 39 Centigrade) in the open areas of the farm, but the air cooled appreciably (to perhaps 95 F) beneath the shade of the canopy. This area contains fruit trees, cacao, allspice, and a variety of medicinal plants and herbs that flourish in the shade, just as the motto on the Belize flag reads.

Narciso approaching the boundary stream
with machete in hand.

Narciso preparing Provision Bark, used to
make a tonic tea, for Judge Courtney.

A small stream that drains into the Belize River forms the northern boundary of Narciso's farm - the adjacent plot belongs to and is worked by his brother. The stream provides needed moisture during the dry season and creates additional ecological niches for aquatic and wetland flora and fauna. Narciso described some animals in the stream that he called "weasels," but which sounded like the seldom-seen tropical river otter to us.

Narciso applying crushed leaves as a salve
to the bruise.

Bandaging the herbal salve with a leaf and
securing it with a piece of vine.

I've mentioned that forest gardeners cultivate medicinal plants alongside food crops, and this time we unfortunately needed to use some of these resources. Anabel received a nasty bruise on her arm the night before our visit, and we did what we could with the materials - mostly ice - available at our house. Narciso took a look at the bruise and immediately went off to find a remedy, which he then applied and bandaged with materials ready at hand. Anabel reported a soothing effect from this salve.

I've only been able to show a small fraction of what Narciso has growing in his fabulous forest garden, but I hope this was a sufficient glimpse of the remarkable biodiversity promoted by this traditional form of Maya agriculture. The contemporary Maya forest is teeming with economically useful plants and trees, and this abundance may be the result of ancient forest management and land-use strategies. We can test this hypothesis with paleoecological data recovered from El Pilar and its surroundings, and we're working to gather this information along with the archaeological settlement data from our survey.

And yes, our trip to Narciso's farm did include two horse sightings, although neither of those horses belonged to him.

This old mare belongs to Narciso's brother. She was freed from her tether shortly after I took this pic.

Finally, today seems to be an auspicious day for posting about gardens, as the three most important mothers in my life - my mom, Patti Horn; my partner, Linda Howie; and my grandmother, whose 90th birthday is also today, Helen Moran - all enjoy gardening and tending useful plants. I'd like to wish them all a Happy Mother's Day and to dedicate this post to them!

Friday and Saturday Night Fun, end of April edition

One of best things about powering through a brutally hot first day in the field was the knowledge that our schedules were cleared for the weekend. Not that we don't like doing fieldwork - we really do - but it was incredibly hot at the end of April, despite a few early rain showers, and extreme heat has adverse effects on my cognitive processes. Witness, for example, the drop in productivity on this blog since last Thursday. We still had a number of tasks to accomplish in our lab and around town on Friday and Saturday - figuring out what went wrong with our GPS units, for one - but the lack of a physically demanding field schedule freed us up to have some fun on the last weekend in April.

We drove into Belmopan, the capital of Belize, on Friday afternoon for a multipurpose visit. For those of you not familiar with Belmopan, it's not a typical destination for thrill-seekers in western Belize on a Friday night. But it is where the Belize Institute of Archaeology is headquartered, and both Anabel and I needed to pay registration fees for the Belize Archaeological Symposium at the end of June. We arrived after 4 pm and got to chat with a couple of friends on the Institute staff, which was great for me, because I hadn't seen them in nearly a year. 

After paying our registration and getting some information for Anabel at a different government agency, we proceeded to the National Agricultural and Trade Show, held at a fairground just outside the city. I'd never been to this event before - I've never been to Belize this early in the year, actually - and it was quite the experience. Probably not the full experience you'd get on Saturday and Sunday, as most exhibits were still setting up when we arrived on the scene, but we were able to talk to some farmers, agriculturalists, horticulturalists, and various others who were enthusiastic about growing things.

James stands next to Pumpkin Man and other assorted giant squashes while Anabel talks to Cayo Ag. officials.

Fulfilling all your chicken-based needs in a timely fashion.

Opening night was something like a combination 4-H fair and high-level diplomatic event. There were a number of vendors and agriculturalists, ranking civil servants, members of government, ambassadors, representatives of the British High Commission and the Organization of American States, and the Governor General of Belize, to name a few attendees. I was happy I wore long pants. We didn't partake of the food and drink at the party, which we were technically not invited to attend, but we did enjoy conversing with various dignitaries and listening to the band.

These kids rocked it! Also, US diplomatic car in the background. No ambassador yet for Belize, so the Chargé

 d'Affaires attended.

We left the Ag Fair after a little more than an hour and headed back down the Western Highway toward BRASS Base. To break up the drive and fill our empty bellies, we stopped at a funky little place in Unitedville called Casa Sofia. I was completely oblivious to this place, but Anabel had noticed it on a previous drive. I don't have any pictures, being primarily focused on the excellent food and beer proffered by the owner/operator, but you can see the open plan of the dining room on his website. The place is run by a transplant from Palermo, Sicily, whom we later found out is named Luigi, and the food is fantastic. Everyone, even James - who may be the pickiest eater I've ever met - left smiling and content.

Saturday we ran some errands around town and began looking at our data from Thursday in the GIS. Data entry and GIS editing are not exactly exciting discussion topics, so I'll skip ahead to the end of the workday when the fun really began. We received a visitor from Belize City, the Honorable Justice Courtney Abel of the Supreme Court of Belize, who had been sweating it out on this brutally hot day down at the Ag Fair in Belmopan. After he refreshed himself with a quick swim, we loaded into his vehicle and headed to a Literary Evening at the Wildfire Artzsmosphere gallery in San Ignacio, which is an art-space that I'm pretty sure used to be a bar/live-music venue in days gone by.

Wildfire Artzmosphere performance space. Directly above what used to be PitPan, Coconuts, and probably several other bars.

Art adorns the walls behind the main performance space.

Anabel reading with orchid necklace.

Jim Arnold reads a poem about archaeology!

The event was sponsored by the Belize Book Industry Association as part of a series celebrating Book Week 2017. Anabel was invited to read a few passages from her recent book about ancient Maya land use and environment, and a number of Belizean artists read works of poetry and prose. We saw several performances in a variety of styles, ranging from traditional spoken word to hip-hop inspired slam.

Kieron Gabriel delivers a high-energy slam
about life in Belize City.

Yes, there was South Asian-inspired
dancing, too.

We heard poems about the problems facing Belizeans today, the legacies of colonialism that are omnipresent in Belizean society, love, the sea, nationalism, and a plethora of other topics too numerous to list here save one: archaeology! I've never attended anything like this in my years coming down to Belize, and I left the event thoroughly impressed with the literary scene.  Also, they were selling glasses of sangria for $2 BZ, which helped a bit with the heat on a still and humid night.

Unexpectedly fun events happen a lot down here on the weekends, and you never know what you'll find or who you'll meet when you step away from project work for a little while. Cayo has a lot more to offer than bars and tourist traps. Not that there's anything wrong with the bar scene, but I've never seen a pirate hat casually laying around in any watering hole down here.

Not sure if this was part of an exhibit or was left behind by Geoffrey Rush.

Fieldwork! Day 1

It seems my grand vision of immediately writing up each day's fieldwork experiences immediately after returning to BRASS Base was derailed after our very first working trip to El Pilar. In retrospect, that was probably a pipe dream all along - I'm usually tired coming out of the field on a normal day, and last Thursday (27 April) was a particularly hot one. I've already written about what we did in fairly broad strokes over at Experiment, and I'm trying to avoid overlap between these two platforms as much as possible, so I'll concentrate on some of the peculiarities of our first day in this post.

Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to survey in the morning. I wish we looked this chipper at the end of the day.

The day started out like many others last year, albeit with a different set of objectives. Instead of our usual goal of surveying and mapping settlement remains in unexplored areas, we would be checking on a series of problematic structures identified by Anabel's students at UC Santa Barbara. Our project has mapped hundreds of mounds, plazas, platforms, quarries, terraces, chultunob' (storage pits), and other cultural features within the Reserve boundaries, and it's almost inevitable that certain bits of information will get lost in the process. Lucky for us, Anabel has built in a system of data checks that makes resolving these kinds of problems easier.

Today was also a chance for us to test a new extension for ArcGIS - the software I use to make all the fancy maps in here - that would allow us to load GPS points directly into the handheld units without using an intermediary program. This seemed like a good idea that would cut down the number of steps in transferring data and potentially prevent some transcription errors. GPS waypoints help us navigate to features on our LiDAR maps, and we record waypoints when mapping structures to guide their placement in real space. GPS is an integral component of our survey methodology, and we're always looking for more efficient ways to use these data. The results of this particular experiment, alas, were disastrous. The extension would only load 1000 waypoints at a time and returned an error message if you attempted to move to "page 2" of the waypoint list, which doesn't sound too bad, unless you have 1098 waypoints you want to load. Perhaps more ominously, attempts to download any waypoints through the extension crashed the entire program. But we decided to deal with this later.

They look so innocent nestled in their little crate...

An even bigger problem arose from the amount of waypoints we attempted to load into our handheld units, which was entirely my fault. As you can see above, we have four GPS units. They all look the same, but one of them is different. Three are Garmin 62s, and one is a Garmin 64s, which is a newer model with more capacity to handle GPS data. We loaded around 2500 waypoints into these little machines - certainly an excessive number that we would probably never need - but we didn't realize that the 62s models could only handle 2000 waypoints at a time. I checked that the waypoints we needed were loaded (they were) and that each unit had memory to spare (they did - about 3 GB each), but I didn't think to take any test points before heading to El Pilar the next morning. This led to some rather frightening error messages and a frantic scramble to delete unneeded waypoints when we reached the field. Not exactly how you'd want your first day in the field to begin, but we persevered and came up with a contingency plan that worked well enough.

It was not our intention to replicate Dr. Emmett Brown's Flux Capacitor schematic with our GPS tracks

Once we figured out a workaround, we were off to the races. I use that turn of phrase despite knowing of no races through thick tropical undergrowth in 100-degree weather at the time of writing. We estimated our walking distance at between 9 and 10 kilometers, and we covered a pretty good-sized chunk of the El Pilar core area. We did some of this walking on previously cut brechas and trails - whenever we could, in fact - but most of the groups we needed to check were a little off the beaten paths. Here's a look at what we did.

James is standing halfway up the mound.

Now James is on the mound's summit.

Some of the checks were fairly straightforward: locate the problematic mound, record whatever data happened to be missing, and move on to the next target. This wasn't too hard when working with larger mounds, such as the one James is standing on in these photos. If something looked fishy in our GIS drawings, we'd take a quick look around and make a decision before checking that structure off our list.


Other problems were not so easy to deal with, especially when our structure maps didn't accurately represent what we saw on the ground. When this happened, we had to decide what we were actually looking at, quickly measure and re-sketch the feature(s) in question, and take more GPS points to help redraw these features in our GIS back at the lab. Below is an example of what that looks like.

Nothing to see here, just your average mother-and-child mound pair

We thought this map looked very suspicious. You often see mounds of various sizes in close proximity to one another, but a tiny mound abutting a larger one at such an angle could not be taken seriously by any self-respecting Maya archaeologist. We had to see this for ourselves, and decided we were looking at a single, L-shaped mound instead. This could represent two structures that merged together after both had collasped, but there was no way of discerning this from the evidence on the ground, so we re-sketched the map and took more GPS points. As you'll see below, the error in the GPS measurements makes them far from perfect indicators of a structure's outline or position, but they do help guide final map drawing when combined with field sketches.

Getting closer to reality, but it's a good thing we have our sketches

We moved quickly through these assignments and accomplished in one day what we had budgeted for two. But later in the afternoon, as we were walking back out through the bush to the main road and our car, the heat began to take its toll, at least on me. I was mindful to drink lots of water that day, it being my first back in the field doing actual work, but the heat was stifling, and I drank the last drop from my second canteen before leaving our final target. There were no direct trails back to the road, and the trudge through the forest was grim. I began to lose sense of my surroundings in the battle to put one foot in front of the other until we made it out, and I stepped directly over a medium-sized snake - an event of which I would've remained oblivious, had not James and Narcisso, who were behind me, immediately shouted for my attention. This didn't even register until I had taken several steps forward, and at that time I couldn't have cared less. Apparently it was only a boa, but it could've been something far worse. I guess got lucky this time.

Mapping the Twin Towns whilst Running Errands

Archaeological projects are complex machines. They run only as well as their infrastructure permits, and only as long as they're continuously oiled by a steady stream of logistical tasks. Fortunately for us, Anabel has been maintaining a robust base of operations in Santa Elena for years (more on that here), with a house that is lived in and maintained even after the project closes for the season. I've had to open field houses down here that were closed down since the previous year, and the results can be less than pretty.

Opening a lab house in 2010. It took a pickax to loosen these insect mounds from the door jambs.

Few things compare to the bouquet of dried cat urine in a sweltering concrete house. FYI: We didn't have a cat.

James, ready (?) to go with the GPS.

Even with a stocked and well-maintained base, there are always many errands to run before getting started with fieldwork. You have to buy food, supplies for both lab and field, and any number of miscellany; do vehicle maintenance, including such exotic tasks as buying tires and renewing insurance; and drop in on friends from town whom you may not have seen for a year. Different errands can be tedious, fun, or somewhere in between, but they are always time-consuming, no matter how you swing it.

You also need well-trained personnel to carry out your fieldwork, because even the fanciest gear produces garbage data when your surveyor can't use it properly. Training also takes time, and that's something we never have enough of when setting up a project. In the spirit of efficiency and innovation, we decided to combine these two tasks, and teach our new assistant archaeologist James how to use the GPS whilst running errands around the Twin Towns. We would also get James up to speed on our procedures for downloading GPS data and visualizing them in our Geographic Information System (GIS). This would also save us the embarrassment of being a survey crew forced to buy a map of our surroundings. Here's what we've come up with thus far. It's a work in progress, but it's getting there.

A couple of days worth of errands, all in one map.

The red line in the map, just like in our tour of El Pilar, shows the GPS track of our journeys around the Twin Towns and beyond. The small circles are GPS waypoints that we took at markets, vendors, mechanics, friends' houses, and other places we thought were important. This map is scaled up a bit to show our epic journey to the Mennonite community Spanish Lookout in search of new rear tires for our vehicle. Perhaps epic is a strong word - and we did know the tires would be waiting for us when we arrived, so we weren't exactly searching - but that particular errand took us quite a long way away from our base. If you locate the BRASS BASE waypoint and follow the red line east, you'll trace our route to the ferry across the Belize River and up toward Spanish Lookout. Much to my chagrin, the GPS also recorded a wrong turn I took on the way out to Caribbean Tire. You can also see that we took a different route back, following the road that runs north of the river to the southwest before dipping south across the Mopan at Bullet Tree Falls and returning home. The points and tracks through Santa Elena and San Ignacio are a little too crowded to be of much use at this scale, so we'll zoom in for a closer look.

It all looks so organized from up here...

Here you can see more of the places we've visited over the past couple of days, although some are still clustered too close together to be clearly labeled at this scale. We'll probably have to split up the Twins into separate maps at some point, and we're still expanding our database by taking different streets to visit different places. In time, we'll have a nifty map of project hot spots and know the best ways to get there. James now has experience gathering and processing "survey" data with the same procedures we'll be using daily at El Pilar, and we managed to accomplish all the tasks on our list - Anabel is much better at making those than I am - in a remarkably short amount of time. I think we hit the trifecta with this one.

A Quick Visit to El Pilar

James, our new assistant archaeologist, and I arrived in Santa Elena on Saturday evening, April 15. Santa Elena is the less touristy twin of San Ignacio, and we stay there because, above all else, we need to keep it real. Or perhaps because Anabel has established an impressive project infrastructure here after years of working in the area - I'll have to get back to you on that, but I've written a bit about our base here, and you can see pics of James and some of our other staff there as well.

This would be a great time to visit the Twin Towns if partying was your game: most people had a long weekend over Good Friday and Easter, and a small fair had come to town, featuring food, music, and rides. Who wouldn't want to jump on a Ferris wheel colloquially called the Wheel of Death? Unfortunately, I have no pics to share of that monstrosity, as my phone was exhausted from its long journey and I had no other camera handy. You'll have to conjure the image of a smallish rusty-looking wheel, driven by an old truck engine to dizzying speeds, on your own. The Easter holidays continued through Monday, which is great if you work down here or are on vacation, but not so great if you're trying to set up project logistics on a short timeline. After a morning filled with project planning, we decided to make the most of everyone else's day off by taking a quick trip up to El Pilar to get James acquainted with the monumental core. Through the magic of Global Positioning System technology - the full name sounds much more magical than its shorthand (GPS) - you, too, can join our tour! I promise it will be brief - El Pilar is far too big to write about in one quick post. Have a look at the map. I'll do a quick explainer and then we'll follow our path through this part of the site, which is marked by the numbers in black.

Yes, indeed, we have LiDAR.

You're looking at the largest complex of monumental architecture at El Pilar. Just out of view to the right (east) is another massive monumental group, the Citadel, which reminds me of a European Iron Age hillfort. We didn't visit the Citadel this time, but fear not: you can read more about it here, and I'm certain to spill more digital ink on it in the near future. If you followed the two gray parallel lines running to the left (west) of the image - which represent a 30-meter-wide causeway - you would arrive at Pilar Poniente, a separate monumental complex connected to the group shown here by an offset causeway and sunken plaza. I'll return to Poniente at a later time as well. The red line you see is the track recorded by our handheld GPS unit, which shows our progression through the site. I've marked some points of interest with numbers to make sure no one gets lost.

Parking - This is where we parked our vehicle and took a new GPS point. El Pilar is set up to receive tourists, and this is a cleared area meant for the point's eponymous purpose. Having a GPS point where you leave your vehicle can come in very handy when you venture out of the areas maintained for tourism, and that's exactly what we'll be doing when we begin work next week.

Along the path from the parking area to our first point, we passed through an example of a Maya forest garden. This area was seeded with different economically useful plants and trees through consultation with contemporary, practicing Forest Gardeners, and it gives a sense of what ancient Maya infield agricultural plots - or home gardens - may have been like.

Paths lead through the Forest Garden east of the monumental core.

Point 1 - We arrive at our first point of interest, a large, ancient household group named Tzunu'un ("hummingbird").

Sign at Tzunu'un showing an architectural reconstruction of the household group.

Tzunu'un consists of five structures - and possibly a sixth, later platform - that would have been used by a residential group for different purposes. Three of the five buildings were made of perishable materials - wood, wattle-and-daub, and thatch - and were set on stone-faced platforms. These buildings, located along the north and west edges of the central patio, were probably where the group slept, cooked food, and carried out any number of other domestic activities. Little of them remains aside from their stone foundations. The eastern structure (Structure 2), pictured below, was a small pyramidal shrine with a stone-walled and thatch-roofed building placed on top. Eastern shrines were common among higher status residential groups during the Classic period, and the Maya frequently buried important family members inside these platforms. The building on top has a curious niche inset in its northern wall.

Structure 2, the eastern shrine at Tzunu'un.

The largest building at Tzunu'un, Structure 1, sat on the patio's southern border. It was the only building with a vaulted stone roof and plaster benches in this group, and its perch atop a large stone platform elevated it above the patio and other structures. Five rooms separated by spine walls comprised its interior. This imposing building was probably used for receiving audiences, important visitors, and other formal affairs. You can read more about excavations at Tzunu'un by Anabel and her team here.

Structure 1, the only vaulted building at Tzunu'un.

Before moving on, I'd like to make a quick note on residential unit interpretation and population estimates. Many of us working in the Maya Lowlands struggle with population estimation, which is one of the most basic pieces of data necessary to reconstruct aspects of past societies. How do you come up with a population estimate for people who cannot be counted? Archaeologists use different formulas, based on ethnographic observations and a number of assumptions (like structure contemporaneity and other esoterica best left alone here), to estimate ancient populations. We apply these formulas to what we think are domestic structures, because they are presumably the buildings that housed the populations we are trying to estimate. Problems arise when considering which buildings actually housed people and can be meaningfully used as proxies for those people. Some researchers use the total number of domestic structures in their population estimates, and that seems problematic. We don't think people were living in Structure 1, and we're certain they weren't living in Structure 2. One of the smaller, perishable buildings was likely a kitchen, so people probably didn't live in there, either. If we applied our population formula to all five structures at Tzunu'un we would have an artificially high estimate. Not such a big deal at this scale, perhaps, but when you consider the hundreds or thousands of domestic structures across an entire site, you can begin to see the scope of the problem. I'll come back to population estimates in a later post...we've tarried here long enough.

Point 2 - I don't have any pictures for this or the next point, so please bear with me, and I'll be brief. They are interesting features, and I'm sure I'll return to them again in later posts. We passed a large, peculiar range structure along our path north from Tzunu'un. This actually consists of three structures in a linear, roughly north-south arrangement, which measures about 60 meters long. The central structure - clearly not vaulted but possibly once topped by a perishable building - was higher than those that flanked it, but none were taller than three meters. This configuration is similar to the massive winged temple EP7 in Plaza Copal (more on that later), and the structure's location is also curious: it is almost due east of EP7 and closely matched to its alignment. This was probably a later construction, which raises the question of why the inhabitants would build what appears to be a cheap knockoff of an old and venerable temple? One more item on the to-do list, but probably not for this year.

Point 3 - We proceeded from the anomalous range structure up a small rise and arrived at a level surface that supported another patio group. The mounds here were large but configured differently from the nearby Tzunu'un group, and their proximity to the central monuments further suggested the high status of their occupants. Unlike Tzunu'un, however, no structures in this group have been excavated. The small hill is bordered on the east by a steep ravine, and the people living here could have seen the Citadel in that direction. We followed a small, raised causeway - we'll call it that for now, anyway - down from this group toward the monumental structures to the west.

Point 4 - After crossing the modern road that cuts through part of the central complex, we passed through Plaza Duende, a large open terrace with a solitary pyramid near its north end. We continued down a trail to the Chert Site, where masses of stone tool production debris were discarded. Large, general purpose bifacial axes were produced here from chert, aka flint if you come from across the Pond. Smaller pieces of debris were recovered in situ from the surface of a nearby cobble platform, and the larger, hazardous flakes were collected and deposited in a massive heap away from this work surface. The sheer volume of material deposited suggests specialized production of an important economic resource. Although not unique, large-scale production locales such as this are rare in Maya city centers (reference here, gated).

Thousands of chert flakes on the ground surface. Lens cap for scale.

Point 5 - Winding our way back from the Chert Site, we passed through the most open and accessible plaza in the site center and into the most restricted, inaccessible complex of buildings and courtyards to the north. This acropolis comprises a series of elevated buildings and smaller, sunken plazas, with access-ways offset to further restrict movement in and out. The architectural expression of centralized power and authority here is stunning. Already large buildings were scaled up and renovated throughout the Classic period, creating a complex and confusing architectural sequence that has only been partially unraveled. In this area Anabel discovered, excavated, and consolidated a standing vaulted passageway. Intact passageways are relatively rare in the Central Maya Lowlands due to the instability of corbel vaults over long periods of time. I suspect that the strange westward spike in our GPS track occurred when we entered this tunnel.

Corbel arch entryway to the vaulted Zotzna Tunnel.

Point 6 - After spending quite a bit of time climbing around the administrative center of El Pilar, we gradually made our way back south and into the public ceremonial precinct. Plaza Copal, where Point 6 is located, contains some of the oldest and largest temple pyramids in the city. The structures bounding Plaza Copal to the east and west are part of an E-Group, an ancient architectural configuration with roots in the Middle Preclassic (~ 900 B.C.) that became widespread across the lowlands. Middle Preclassic structures were discovered by tunneling excavations into EP7, the 17-meter-tall eastern winged temple, and a section of an early platform was revealed beneath EP10 across the plaza. This area contains the oldest architecture known from El Pilar, and it seems to have been an important area from the earliest days of the city's founding. Another important feature of Plaza Copal is the ballcourt in its southeast corner, through which we walked on our way back to our vehicle in the parking area.

Look east across Plaza Copal at EP7, the 17-meter-high winged temple.

I could spend several more hours discussing things like E-Groups, ballcourts, palaces/administrative centers, specialized production, population estimates, and so on, but I think this is a good place to end the tour, for now. There's a lot more to come, and we haven't even started the real work yet.

Prep for Departure, or The Many that Got Away

Preparing for a long-haul season of fieldwork has never been an easy job for me. This probably has to do with a life-long procrastination habit - witness the creation of my first blog at age...well, we'll leave that part blank - and my unwillingness to make lists to accomplish "simple" tasks. As many times as I've done this, I serially forget how complex packing for a three month field season can be. There are field clothes, the true beaters of the bunch; lab/town clothes, a step up from field clothes and generally not as sweaty or dirty on any given day; and conference clothes, the top of the heap, true finery reserved for the end of season symposium. And that's just the clothes, let alone all the gear. Not quite the same as your average vacation in the tropics, and yet each year I attempt to sort this out the day, or perhaps the night, before departure. This always leads to things being left behind that are difficult or impossible to replace in the field.

Compounding my regular packing difficulties was a two-step departure plan fit only for a madman. I would drive about three hours to my parents' house in Lansing, MI, on Friday (April 14), and there acquire some of the last things I thought I needed for the trip - again, no list. I would go to sleep at some point and awake at 2:30 am to drive toward Detroit, where my flight would leave at 6:30. After a long morning layover in Denver, I would board another flight to Ladyville, Belize, and arrive in the late afternoon. What could possibly go wrong with that? Turns out, plenty, and plenty did.

The first leg of travel was supposed to have one major upside: a simplified first stage of packing, where I had only to gather everything I needed together in piles, shove all the items in a suitcase and two backpacks, and sort it all out later. There was ample space for everything I needed, and I knew the whereabouts of all my gear. So I rounded up what I thought was all of it, put the bags in my car, and hit the road. It was only after I arrived in Lansing, road-weary and absolutely unwilling to visit another shop, that I realized a few crucial items were somehow missing from my "carefully" laid-in stores:

1) My DSLR camera - it's a bit hard to overstate the shock I felt when my camera case failed to materialize from the various bags I'd packed. A good camera is an archaeologist's best friend, and I'd spent hard-earned grant money on that sweet machine. In the ensuing panic - there was no way I was driving six hours round-trip at that point, so retrieval was out of the question - only one thought kept me calm: the camera, beloved though it be, was now seven years old, and the camera on my smart phone boasted six more mega-pixels. I never jumped on the "use my phone for all things archaeology" bandwagon, and I'm still learning to reach for a tiny, delicate rectangle instead of a big, bulky, irregularly shaped object when I want to snap a pic. We'll see how that goes.

2) My wireless mouse - not a biggie for the field, but I was really looking forward to not using the touch-pad on my new laptop. I can't stand them. Plus, the mouse was a graduation gift, and it seemed fitting to put it to use in my chosen profession. There are a few spare mice running around our field house, so the disaster here is mitigated somewhat.

3) Batteries - these are comparatively expensive in Belize, so it's always a good idea to bring extras. Perhaps I won't need as many without a wireless mouse?

4) Flashlights - why bring flashlights if you don't have batteries to power them? (I do have a phone and a camping lantern)

5) The 3rd book in a series I'm reading - this is perhaps most maddening of all. I'm nearly done with the second book, and somehow I managed to pack the fourth and fifth. I refuse to read those out of sequence! (I do have some other books to read)

The second leg of travel exacted both a human and materiel price. A conservative estimate of hours I slept on Friday night would be around three; the actual total was probably closer to one and a half. Coffee and a shower were enough to get me to Detroit, but caffeine lost all efficacy once I passed through security, even though I must have been approaching the lethal dose for someone my size. The prospect of a three hour morning layover in Denver after flying for over two hours was grim. Happily, the bars were open in Denver, and with little trepidation I imbibed a few micro-brewed porters and was merrily human again by my 10:30 flight. I was also able to partially replace a piece of equipment left behind at the previous stage:

6) My cell phone charger - given the new role of my phone as primary personal camera and potential flashlight, I nearly had a breakdown when I realized I'd left the charger plugged into a socket at my parents' house in Lansing. This, after I was mistakenly admonished for having left it in my own home, a high crime of which I was not guilty and loudly said as much. I'd never been inside one of those chintzy electronics shops they have in airports before Denver, and now I know the reason; but I did come away with a USB cord that will charge my phone from a computer inside 24 hours, give or take a few. I'd guess the packaging cost more than the product in this case.

Check out that sweet sweet case! Definitely worth all $16 on its own.

That important items were left behind is particularly galling this year, as for the first time in recent memory, my flight to Belize allowed two checked bags to come along free of charge. I had plenty of space and no need to cram, which perhaps induced a relaxed state of mind that ended up working against me. I will miss all these items - some of them sorely - over the next three months, but I take consolation knowing that alternatives and backups were embedded in the system. Flexibility is the key to a successful field season; my forgotten things will cause inconvenience, but as Gloria Gaynor once said, I will survive.



Well, there it is, my first full blog post. Looking back, it's a little text-heavy, but who videos themselves packing, and who would want to see pictures of suitcases or missing items? I'm not even sure how I'd manage the latter. But there will be more visuals to come, and perhaps some links to famous French philosophers if I want to sound smarter than usual. Thanks for reading!