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.