Day 32: More Excavations and Visiting Aguacate Dos!

About two weeks ago I told you about a new, larger site that our directors discovered (well, they were the first from our group to find it) while surveying the area nearby our site. As it turns out, that site, named Aguacate Dos after our original El Aguacate, actually has larger buildings than our current site. And we finally got to go visit it yesterday!
The site is off the road to the left there (or south, if you care), about 30 meters into the jungle. I features your usual plaza (it's so much bigger than ours!) surrounded by structures that currently look like very pyramidal mounds of dirt (also bigger). The major difference between this site and ours? It was looted. And when I say looted, I mean LOOTED. There is a full picnic table, barbecue, and lights set up there that the looters very possibly used while they dug the biggest looter's trench I have ever seen. Observe:

Looters usually trench into the sides of temple-type buildings in hopes of finding burials rich with artifacts, etc. This one is actually pretty clearly done by inexperienced looters for a number of reasons. Let's take a look with another picture:
Do you see Beau all the way down there at the bottom? See how HUGE this thing is? Now think about the fact that this thing is dug into the side of a thousand-year-old structure. It can and will collapse at any moment. They're actually really lucky it didn't collapse on them.

This isn't all bad though--thanks to that trench, we can see that this building was built in nine layers, because you can count the floors up the profile of the trench. Also, there's evidence of a paleo-indian structure at the very bottom. Those two things tell us that this site was in use for a very long time. It's pretty cool to know all of that stuff right off the bat, even if it does mean the total mangling of a building.

And then I waxed artsy! This is a tree that tops another structure at Aguacate 2.
Love you!
Elise