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.