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.