Still Alive and Working Away

I just wanted to drop a quick note here to let anyone who's reading this blog that yes, I'm still alive, and our survey is still going strong in the northwest area of the El Pilar Reserve. In fact, the survey is going so strong that I find myself with little time or energy at the end of the day to write. Our docket looks something like this during the week:

0530 - Wake up
0600 - Breakfast
Somewhere between 0630 and 0700 - Fire up the F-350 and head out to El Pilar
0745 - Arrive at the park
0815-0830 - Arrive at our survey area
0830-1500 - Survey and map the heck out of everything we find in our grid squares
1500 - Return to BRASS Base
1600-1700 - Download all GPS data, collect paperwork
1830 - Dinner
1900 - Video chat with my partner and our son
1930 - Continue work on digitizing our maps in the project GIS and plan strategy for the next day
...Sleep?

It's a pretty demanding schedule, and we recently lost James - who was handling our GPS downloading and a lot of our digitizing procedures - to another project. We may have someone interested in taking over James' old duties, but its up to me to manage these tasks until he shows up and starts working. So, not a lot of time for writing. I do take detailed notes in the field, however, and I've been thinking about doing some retrospective posts based on those. Until then, here are some points of interest:

1) My team has encountered two barba amarillas - aka the dreaded fer-de-lance - in the past two weeks. Both were juveniles and were dispatched without incident, but it's always a little unsettling to encounter these beasts in the forest. They are uncommonly aggressive for snakes and highly venomous, and their camouflage patterning makes them difficult to see in the leaf litter they typically inhabit. I don't like to kill animals unnecessarily, but we don't take chances with these guys.

2) Our Guatemalan co-director, Paulino, had a run-in with killer bees of the non-Wu-Tang variety last Wednesday. Our survey teams were separated by close to a kilometer when this happened, and he was able to escape the swarm without serious injury. He estimates he was stung over 30 times, mostly on his head and neck, which was not a pleasant experience. We were lucky in having a shortened workweek that gave poor Paulino a chance to recover.

3) We've visited the sites Tikal, Uaxactun, and Lamanai, and attended an archaeological symposium in Santa Elena, Peten, Guatemala. I'll write some more about that later.

4) We finished mapping over 1 square kilometer of what I originally called the Central Supercluster, a concentration of large architectural groupings visible in our LiDAR map. This area contains something on the order of 100 sites - meaning housemounds, temples, platforms, and other cultural features - which is a rather astonishing density. We're still working on getting all this data digitized in the GIS and I'll be able to report on it more completely soon. I'm also thinking of changing the name of this area to the Amatal Supercluster, because the area is full of giant amate (fig) trees.

5) In keeping with my science fiction/astronomical naming convention, we're moving on to survey and map the Kum Expanse. Northwest of the Amatal Supercluster lies the minor center Kum, a complex of temple pyramids, large platforms, and other buildings concentrated in an area of about 6.25 hectares (around 15 and a half acres). Our LiDAR map shows some settlement in between these monumental centers, but much of the area seems curiously blank. We covered some of this ground last Wednesday and found that, indeed, there are mounds in some of the intervening spaces, but we have a lot more work to do to figure out what is going in the curious Expanse surrounding Kum. As we enter our second month, we certainly have our work cut out for us. I only hope that the day-long rain today wasn't a harbinger of things to come.