Local Tidbit: Assorted Creepies and Crawlies from the Jungle

The jungle animals have definitely come out in full force lately, so I thought I might as well just dedicate an entire post to them. It is SERIOUSLY like living in Discovery Channel over here.

1)Leafcutter Ants are everywhere! It's so funny because there are these little trails of walking leaves prettymuch anywhere you go. Apparently the leaves they harvest grow some sort of fungus that they then eat. In any case, don't ever be impressed by any footage of leafcutter ants in action ever again--easiest thing in the world to come accross.

2) Army Ants. Now THESE are a different story. When they say "army ant invasion" they are not joking! We had one today at the site and it was mind boggling. The entire colony just sweeps across an area, eating everything in sight! This particular invasion blanketed about a 10 meter-square area (huge!) and were just swarming all over everything! They went up trees, over and under everything--it was insane! All the other insects were running away ahed of them, like animals in front of a forest fire. I saw them catch a cricket, and it was brutal! One of them bit its leg as it was trying to jump away, and when it stumbled, five or six of them jumped on and devoured it! They literally can eat through anything. They're like the piranhas of the jungle! DEFINITELY YouTube them and be amazed.

3)Scorpions. A couple of these have been found around the site, but they're really not that bad. One of the Belizian staff members, Josue, can milk the poison out of them and make them harmless. He tried to get me to hold one when he was done with it today but I was having none of it.

4)Spiders here are surprisingly a nonevent. Sure, they're prettymuch everywhere, and yes, they're huge (think the size of a tennis ball) but they're generally scared of humans and don't cause problems. The only issue is if you walk into one of the webs they string between trees. We've actually marked off a couple of webs with hot pink tape so that people don't have to go through that. We also have full-blown tarantulas, but again, seeing those is pretty rare because they're generally running away.

5) Snakes. The snakes here are intense! There's one, called the yellowjaw, whose venom is so poisonous that if you're bitten you have two hours to get to a hospital before you die. In fact, it might be the most poisonous snake in the world. But again, never fear, Josue is here! While he was out on survey they ran across a HUGE yellowjaw but he (and his jungle awesomeness) took care of that. Here's a picture of him with the snake once he was through. Yep, he's pretty awesome with that Machete.

4) Howler Monkeys. These guys are super cool! They definitely don't like us (they started throwing their poop at another unit yesterday) but with good reason. We've noticed that they generally roar most when we first walk into the jungle and whenever the workmen have to cut down trees for some reason (like, for example, if they're in the middle of a unit). Since they live in the canopy, it makes perfet sense that they would be pissed that we're taking their habitat. Still, I feel pretty cool when I hear them roaring and don't even flinch...

5) Mosquitos CAN DIE. There will be a whole other post dedicated to them, and denfensive tactics against them, later.

Days 10, 11 & 12: It's Friday!

Hi! Sorry for my lack of posting, this whole fieldwork things is remarkably time consuming. And a lot of work! I love it, but I can't remember being this excited that the week is over. For the last three days we've been out at the field, excavating our way through some pretty awesome ruins. After sorting that entire pile of rocks and lithics (those are stones used as or in the production of tools) I have a pretty great handle on lithics in general and I think they're kind of fascinating. I found a bunch of tools that are rare or unique to our site that hopefully will help us to figure out what exactly the Maya were up to there.

The last two days I have been working at a unit that's excavating structure A6, which is the long building on the west end of the plaza. Right now our main goal is to find and expose architecture, and from there we can hopefully understand things like what the building was used for, and maybe even establish a better timeframe estimate for the site in general. I really like our unit so far, and we've been finding a lot of great stuff. Again, I'm not allowed to go into detail online, but it's cool! Today actually we were briefly REALLY excited because one of the staff members, Raf, snuck a bone into one of our buckets to be sifted (which would mean a burial and be sooooo cool!) which was pretty genius.

This weekend we're all headed to Lamanai, a Maya site north of us, and I'm really excited! Apparently, part of the trip getting there requires a boat. Sweet!

Love you,
Elise

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

Day 8: So I guess the Howler Monkeys know we're here...

Well we definitely brought the rain back with us from Caye Caulker! It was pouring all night long and into the morning. Good news though, our cabin is totally waterproof, yay! We were a little worried about going out into the field given the sheer volume of water coming down, but the weather actually very kindly let up in time for us to get to the site, and this was actually our first day of fieldwork where it didn’t rain on us at all. That meant that the bugs were REALLY bad today though, so there’s definitely a bright side to the rain.

I switched to an excavation unit today (for everything you ever wanted to know about excavations, see the post before this!) which was actually really exciting. I’m working on the mysterious northern mound where we have found a ton of chert flakes (bi-products of stone tool production) as well as some pottery shards (yes, it really is pronounced ‘sherds’), a platform/floor, and even a Mano (the handheld part of the Mayan version of a mortar and pestle)! That all makes for evidence that people probably lived in this structure, and gives us high hopes for future finds.

Most exciting, though, was the massive howler monkey showdown that happened in the canopy above us today. We’ve had a few monkeys chilling in the trees above our site for a while now, but they’ve generally kept to themselves. Until today! Even as we walked into the jungle today we could hear them roaring in front of us. The noise they make is incredible! It’s like if an emphysemic man was angry to the point of unintelligible roaring and it’s pretty cool. And intimidating. The monkeys quieted down once we got to the site until, after lunch, when one of the workmen was machete-ing trees west of the big pyramid and they went INSANE. The roaring was so close and so loud that everyone ran over as soon as it started to see. There were probably five monkeys in the trees above us roaring and moving about. They did look down at us a fair amount but they were also running away from this one really big howler monkey, so I really don’t know if they were fighting or feeling threatened by us. Either way, it was so cool! I took video so I’ll try to post them if they’re good.

We finally get to read some GPR data tonight! I hope we find cool things!

Love you,
Elise

Archaeology Corner: Excavating 101

class="MsoNormal">Today was my first day of excavating (yay!) so I thought I’d tell you a bit about what that entails. Warning: as the title implies, this whole thing is a bit educational so skip to the pictures if you don’t want to know the nitty-gritty of playing Indiana Jones.

Look, a grid!

We start by laying a grid using string. If you ever wondered in Geometry about real practical applications for the Pythagorean Theorem, here’s one! Of course, since I had been laying grids all last week with GPR I’m pretty great on those by now.

As soon as you have your unit in place you set a Datum. This is your reference point from which you take all measurements. They’re usually in the southwest corner of a unit but that’s only a convention and can change based on convenience. The site I was digging at today, for example, had a datum in the northwest corner. In addition to having a datum for each unit there is also a master datum for the whole site, which everything can be calculated back to. The survey team locates every datum precisely so that the entire site can be mapped through the measurements we take from them.

Next we take the elevations of the four corners and the center of the unit using a line level. This is really helpful in two ways. First, it gives a sense of the unit’s topography for our notes and posterity, and second, it helps us keep track of how far we’ve dug.

Since we are working in the jungle, there is then a ton of organic debris (leaves, etc) that we need to move even to get to the dirt. From there we take careful notes on the “matrix,” or the soil composition, color, density, etc. There are actually these nifty books called Munsell books (no clue if I spelled that right) that serve as the authoritative dictionaries of soil color and we use them to define the exact coloring. This is all important because any change in matrix is a possible cultural feature. For example, we found a platform in our unit that is only recognizable because of a slight increase in density and clay content.

Then you get to actually move some dirt! Using the flat sides of our trowels and brushes we remove the soil (and rocks, sometimes) in ten-centimeter layers. This layer depth is arbitrary but it’s a good starting point if you don’t know what you’re looking at. If you hit something interesting, layer depths are free to change. We scrape the excess dirt into dustpans (who knew?) then dump those into buckets and, when the buckets are full, put the dirt through sifters to make sure we don’t miss anything. Its thorough, slow work, but SO rewarding when you start finding things!

Days 7 & 8: You guys, we're on an Island In The Middle Of The Caribbean, on break from an archaeological expedition!

We just got back from Caye Caulker and it was so much fun!!!! We actually didn't do that much other than chill on an Island In The Middle Of The Caribbean (eeeee!) but it was the perfect thing. I don't think I can even describe it so I'll do it with pictures. Chronologically, of course!

Despite a pretty late night we got ourselves up at 6 (we slept in!) to catch the 7am bus from San Ignacio to Belize city. Here are Melody and Marisa, two of my lovely roomies, getting ready. The bus trip was without a doubt the most interesting bus ride of my life, so the fact that it was 2.5 hours long was totally cool. But more on that later...

From there we caught a water taxi, which is a really big powerboat that seats about 50 people, out the island. Caye Caulker is actually pretty far out into the sea so it was a 45 minute boat trip. It was pretty awesome but slightly windy.

That's Zena (my other roomie), summer, and Emma enjoying the ride.

Roommate picture!! Here's all four of us on the arrival dock at Caye Caulker. That water was so gorgeous! It's actually pretty funny because even though we arrived with a group of ten people the four of us were the only ones from that group that ended up staying over due to a very close call with some bedbugs so it became a cabin bonding experience. So fun!
Our Hostel! We had a suite in the bluish part of the left building. You have to understand, this was like the best hostel EVER. It was $18 American for the night and the place was gorgeous. And there were no bugs on the entire island!

Naturally, the first thing you MUST do when you get to an Island In The Middle Of The Caribbean (still exciting) is get a pina colada! So we did. Actually, we ate so well this whole weekend! I had nothing but vegetables (I miss them...) and Zena even tried a barracuda! Which is funny because she saw one while she was scuba diving today. Again, these are my cabin-mates, Zena, Marisa, and Melody.

And then we went swimming! The water was INCREDIBLE. All azure and warm and wonderful. The interesting thing is that there aren't really beaches as we think of them at the Cayes because it's so shallow. There's not really a strip of sand, the water just sort of starts when the land gets low enough. Resorts actually ship in their own sand to give people the "white sand" experience.

Remember though, this is the off season for a reason. Soon we noticed the sky becoming a little threatening... Zena interprets:

You have NEVER seen a thunder and lightning storm until you've been in one in the Caribbean! The thunder was so loud it SHOOK things. And it rained SO hard. It was never colder than 75 degrees but you had to be under cover when the rain started because it actually hurt a little. The craziest part though is that these storms only last for like ten minutes because the wind blows so fast! That's Melody running away. And below that's me enjoying the rain while Melody models our rain-avoiding method of choice.

Of course, once it starts raining that hard, it's time to go check out your hostel room for real. And ours ROCKED. Here's Melody sitting in the living room. We had a living room! It only had one bed, but it was really really big so that was fine.

Here's Zena and Marisa taking in the storm from our second-floor balcony. If there's one thing that is absolutely REQUIRED of a house in Belize it's a porch with a hammock. It's the best thing ever.

We actually met up with another group of project friends that night which was superfun. The place we went to was three stories tall with SWINGS everywhere! Actually, using swings as barstools was pretty common on the island which was really cool.

It stormed on and off (remember, the storms are really short) for most of today, so while Zena went scuba diving, Melody, Marisa, and hung out at all sorts of fun sheltered places. This is the dock outside our hostel (which was called Tina's Backpacker's [sic] in case you can't read the sign). While we were chilling there we met a really cool guy who went to UCLA and now lives in San Francisco. He was leaving so he gave us his travel speakers, yay! Now we can have music in our cabin!

After a very relaxing, bug-free, awesome day we grabbed a water taxi back to Belize City. We managed to remember the way back to the bus termial (go us!) and got back without a hitch. Here we are on the way back. It was such a fun weekend!

Love you,
Elise

Day 6: More About our Site

I have to tell you (in case you were wondering) that by all reports, our project is being spoiled rotten in a lot of respects. People keep saying it's archaeology the way they did it back in the day. Our resort, for example, is incredible. Most expeditions that the staff have been on have apparently involved camping at the site. Given the sheer number of bugs, spiders, snakes, and scorpions at our site I cannot tell you how glad I am that we're not! I'm not kidding when I say we're in the jungle. It's so cool!

Also, all of our food is cooked for us by the restaurant next door, called Hode's. They even pack us lunch for the dig. Belizian food, by the way, involves tons of chicken, cooked every way you can think of, rice and beans (of course), and more cole slaw than any human should consume. Considering how hot and humid it is here, the food is actually remarkably heavy.

Back to the site! I mentioned something really crypic the other day about the north end of our current site and I thought I'd clear that up (can you tell I finally have more than ten minutes to write this?). Warning: this might become a little bit of an archaeology lesson so I'm sorry if I bore you. You can always skip to the pictures. So, why our site is so unique: Usually (as in prettymuch always) Maya buildings are organized in Plaza Groups. A plaza group is a cluster of buildings oriented around a central square plaza, usually oriented in the cardinal directions. These plaza groups are closed on all four sides and are the form used in all planning from huge temple plazas to individual households. So, you can see, the fact that our site differs even slightly from that norm is a big deal.

El Aguacate (that's our site) has a main plaza that's much longer than most and only bounded by monumental buildings on three sides. To the south (which is where you enter from) stands a large building that (and keep in mind that this is all covered in jungle and therefore we're not positive on any of this) is, like the Maya structures you picture, a pyramid shape with stairs going up the front and a square sunken courtyard on top, surrounded by rooms. This was probably what we would think of as the palace building. On the east and west of the plaza stand two longer buildings that were probably for administrative and elite residential purposes. And that is where the normal part of our site ends. Be excited!!

Ok, the cool stuff! To the north of the western long building stands a huge pyramid temple (presumably, of course). Not only is this in the wrong spot according to the usual Maya model (because, you recall, it should be bounding the north side of the plaza) but it also doesn't face a cardinal direction. The temple is actually slightly twisted and faces about three degrees east of north. This is unheard of! And THEN, where the temple should stand we have found a smaller mound that is of (I suspect) a significant sacred purpose. Nevertheless, it's very small. We have already found some stuff there and will continue to but I can't really go into detail online.

Ok, Archaeology lesson over! ...for today. Today my team finished up our round at GPR by scanning the eastern long building which was REALLY hard. Dragging that antenna up the side of a pyramid covered in rocks, logs, and trees sixty times over is definitely a workout. But it's exciting because tonight we get to go compile our data and take the first look at what's under there!! So it was definitely worth it!!

Here's a picture of my team! That's Sunaina, yours truly, Aaron (he's MacGyver), and James (tomorrow's his birthday!). We're working on our notes inside the thatched shelter that the workmen just finished building on our site. Cool fact? It's made entirely of materials they grabbed from the surrounding jungle! Even the logs are tied together with vines... Here's another with Sarah, the GPR specialist who ROCKS and has been teaching us lots. We have our arms crossed because we're trying to look tough and strong after traversing that MOUNTAIN of a building mound we're standing on all day.

I'm headed out to Caye Caulker this weekend with a bunch of people from the project! It's a notoriously fun, laid-back island in the Caribbean and I'm really excited! It does mean, however, that you shouldn't expect a post again until Sunday or Monday. Sorry! But I promise I'll post pictures when I get back.

Love you!
Elise