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.

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.