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.