Day 9: Dealing with our pain through poetry

Another day of excavating at El Aguacate! I actually got really lucky because I got a pretty awesome assignment. See, a few of the units (that's a single excavation pit) are being supervised by Belizian archaeology grad students, while the rest are being run by American (and Canadian) ones. This is actually really exciting because, despite the fact that Belize has more prehistoric Maya structures than modern houses, there are only two Belizians with Ph.Ds in Archaeology. And one of those is our own Professor John Morris! So the fact that we have Belizian archaeology students is really cool.

HOWEVER, this particular batch of students is fresh off of working at another site called Baking Pot with the OTHER Dr. of archaeology, Dr. Awe (who gave us a couple lectures and is also super cool). Since that site has been being researched for a while now, they have certain protocols about which artifacts they keep and bring back to the lab and which ones they simply ignore. Obviously at a new site like Aguacate, though, you don't want to ignore any. So one of those sites being run by a Belizian student ended up throwing out a TON of artifacts as per her instructions. When Sam (the other Professor running our project) found out though, he wanted to make sure that we didn't overlook anything. Which meant that I got to spend the rest of the day re-excavating that site's debris pile.

Ok, I realize that sounds terrible, but it was really really cool. See, it was basically a huge pile of rocks that I was supposed to seperate into "artifact" and "actually just a rock" piles. So it was artifact heaven! I found a ton of chert flakes (biproducts of tool production), pottery shards, and even some chert tools. One in particular caught Sam's attention and actually let him to change his working theory of the site's purpose a bit.

Because of all of the chert flakes that we're finding, and the fact that they're prettymuch everywhere, we know that more tool production than usual was going on at this site. However, we're not finding the massive chert flake deposits characteristic of a full-blown chert workshop. Strange. After looking at the rather unique tools I was finding in my garbage pile, however, Sam now thinks that the site was an important factory of SOMETHING, but not tools (mystery mystery mystery...) and that they had to make the very specialized tools they needed there, which is why we're finding evidence of more tool production than usual. Which means that the mysterious northern structure could be the workshop area...

So I forgot to take out my camera all day today (sorry) so as an apology I thought I would give you a little sample of my latest method of dealing with the INSANELY pesky bug bites we're all getting: haiku. Enjoy!

Mosquitos can die.
Collateral damage
eco death? Worth it.

Love you!
Elise