Days 4&5: What is a Picnic without Bread?

That's the song that a local band serenaded our table with last night at dinner. It pondered that timeless question and lamented the accidental purchase of Sauerkraut instead.

I'm sorry I didn't post yesterday! We're into full-swing excavations now so I'm really busy (plus internet access is pretty difficult) but I'll try to fill you in. We broke up into six operations at the site, one survey, one Ground Penetrating Radar, and four excavations. The excavations are about 3x3 meters. The students split into six groups (three or four to a group) and we're gonna rotate around to all the different operations. I'm in group 1. We rock.

I've been working on the GPR operation, which is actually really cool. It's a device that uses an antenna to transmit radar pulses into the ground and measures how long until they reflect back to check for "different" areas. You drag it back and forth across a a grid (twice a meter) like a lawnmower to make profiles, which are like vertical slices of the ground, and then a computer compiles them and looks for patterns. Unlike excavations though, our grids are about 20 by 30 meters, so we get to cover alot more ground.
Here I am dragging the antenna (the orange box) across our first grid. The trick is that you can't get any air between it and the ground, so we have to clear a lot of rocks and sticks. Also, ideally you go in a grid pattern, which is a little difficult around the trees of the jungle.
This is what the readout from the GPR looks like (we all took turns walking the antenna, manning the computer, and clearing the path). We're looking for triangular blips. But really it's hard to read until you get back to the lab and consolidate everything. Which we're doing tomorrow!

Exciting news! Our professors were looking around and this site is WAY more major than anyone realized! They found an entirely new plaza group of buildings! Yay!! We're hopefully gonna go take a look at the new part tomorrow.

Answering some questions I've gotten...The town of San Ignacio is technically a town but we are still in what I would normally consider a very small, almost rural setting. The "resort" is prettymuch only occupied by ourselves and other archeological project groups. I haven't really explored the town very much yet because we've been so busy but I'll be going in later this week so I'll let you know. There aren't really any Mennonites where we are, but about half an hour away, in the (even) more rural area.

Ok, gotta go! But I'm having a GREAT time and I'm really excited about everything we're discovering!

Love you,
Elise