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!

A Quick Intro

Hi There!

I'm Sherman, Deputy Director of the El Pilar Project. El Pilar is a large ancient Maya city that sits astride the modern border between Belize and Guatemala, and we're continuing our archaeological survey in the surrounding area this year.

Here's El Pilar in geographical context. You might have to click this to enlarge...sorry.

Anabel Ford is the Principal Investigator at El Pilar and Director of the project, and she has been working in the area for over 30 years. We're moving forward with Anabel's vision of a complete survey of the El Pilar Archaeological Reserve for Maya Flora and Fauna, which is about 20 square kilometers and is full of ancient Maya settlement. We have some fancy LiDAR maps that help us enormously in our survey, because the entire area is covered in dense tropical forest.

This is our LiDAR map of El Pilar and it's surroundings, with mapped architecture drawn over top.

Exploring Solutions Past and other granting agencies have provided funding for archaeological investigations and community outreach efforts in the area - there's much more on that if you follow the ESP link. We have also received generous support from a number of individuals through a crowd-funding campaign at Experiment.com, which has allowed us to expand our project goals this year. You can read more about the project by following that link.

I'm starting this blog to chronicle fieldwork and as a writing outlet whilst in the field. There may be other things that appear here. I don't know, I'm kind of making it up as I go along. But it should be fun.