Belize Adventures

My last week at the field school was full of excitement. On Saturday we got a free day, so we started our morning by going to the ferry shops. Those are the souvenir shops next to the ferry to Xunantunich, and many of the artists are the families of the guys who work on the project, so we like to do our shopping there. They sell a lot of cool stuff, but my favorites are the slate carvings of the Maya calendar and Maya gods. In the afternoon we went horseback riding. We did an hour long trip through the forest around the ranch, and it was a lot of fun. My horse was named Squirrel! We decided to pass the rest of our afternoon by whittling, as one does when one has been without access to technology for a month. We are very easily entertained at this point. Some people made alligators and fish, but I kept it simple and attempted a little canoe. Like usual, we ate dinner at Hode's on Saturday night. I learned a very important lesson in Belizean cuisine at Hode's. You might assum...

We drove all over the country this weekend! Turns out this was partially because the professors didn’t want us sneaking off to the Benque Festival, which was happening this weekend and reportedly gets very rowdy, but it was still fun. Our first stop on Saturday was the Belize Zoo. That’s all the way on the opposite side of the country by the coast, but of course it only takes two hours to drive across Belize. The zoo was really cool because it only has animals native to Belize. It’s really more of an animal sanctuary for injured animals or animals from the exotic pet trade. It also has really cute rhyming signs introducing each animal! I got to pet a tapir, Belize’s national animal, and stand about four feet away from a jaguar. After lunch at the zoo, we went to Altun Ha, a Preclassic Maya site. It was really cool, but to be honest the most exciting part was watching Michael climb ALL THE WAY UP a palm tree (which have no branches to climb!), pick a coconut, climb back down, a...

Remember when I said my first week was busy? I didn’t even know the meaning of the word until this week. On Saturday, we toured Cahal Pech. Cahal Pech is a Preclassic Maya site in the town of San Ignacio. That night we had dinner in town at a restaurant called Hode’s Place, which has some bomb quesadillas. Dinner at Hode’s is also when I get my two hours of WiFi a week. On the way back one of my friends bought stuff to make s’mores, so Nelson helped us make a bonfire to roast marshmallows. The next morning we went to Buena Vista, another site being excavated by our project. They recently found a tomb there, so we got to go see it. It was really cool, and there were a lot of grave goods like fancy pottery. Sunday afternoon we had our only free afternoon of the whole trip, so we swam in the new pool they just set up at camp. On Monday, it was back to work. My partner Michael and I graduated from trowels to pickaxes, so it went much faster and we dug out another layer of our unit...

Nabitunich Resort could only be described as rustic, but I’ve loved staying here so far. All the professors, PhD students, and undergraduates live in cabins with 2-3 people. There’s also a dining hall with a big porch, which is the main common area, the lab building (which really just consists of some beams holding up a roof), and the homes of the people who live and work here. They grow some crops here, mainly fruit and coffee, and they have a lot of pastures for cows, horses, and goats. There are three professors here, a few postdoctoral researchers, probably about twelve PhD students, and eight undergraduates. All the undergrads are UTSA students. Dominique, the owner of Nabitunich, and several other people who work here year round also have their own houses here. One of the workers is Nelson, the night watchman, who we see walking around all the time with his dog, Big Ears. Nelson is the nicest guy ever and all the undergrads have adopted him as our uncle. When we had our bonf...

I’ve had a busy but very fun week! We got back from the airport just in time for a late dinner on Monday night and then went to bed. We got to “sleep in” on Tuesday, which meant breakfast wasn’t until 7am... that’s the opposite of sleeping in if you ask me, but the super early sunrise woke me up anyway. In the morning Dr. Yaeger (one of UTSA’s archaeology professors) led us through the “walk-around” - which the grad students call the Death March. We walked around the whole camp property, looking at some Maya house-mounds in the fields, a site that’s currently being dug where they found a burial, and the Mopan River which the project is named for (the Mopan Valley Archaeological Project). It was really hot but I wouldn’t call it a death march. It was pretty cool, and we got to see some monkeys! On Tuesday afternoon we had our lab orientation. The lab is where all the artifacts brought back from the field get washed and sorted. We learned how to do some basic analysis of lithics...

I landed in the Belize City airport, which is all the way on the coast. From there it’s only about a two hour drive to our camp, which is all the way across the country on the Guatemalan border. On the way over we passed Belmopan, the country’s capital. We also drove through San Ignacio, the closest town, which is about 30 minutes from the campsite. There’s not much of a language barrier here because English is the national language and just about everyone speaks it. I still get to practice my Spanish though, because most of the local people who work on the project speak it. There are also still modern Mayan languages being spoken in our area, as well as a Belizean Creole, which is a mixture of English and Caribbean and African languages. As for the weather, it was definitely really hot for the first few days I was here. Not only does the sun feel hotter closer to the equator, but I swear it looks bigger too. That means we have really pretty sunsets, though. It’s their rainy s...

Hi! My name is Katharine and I'm an anthropology student at UTSA, and I'll be documenting my summer study abroad here. I leave at 8:10 this morning to fly to Belize, where I'm participating in an archaeology field school. Huge shout out to UTSA's Top Scholar Program for allowing me to take advantage of this awesome opportunity! The field school is run by UTSA faculty and I will get to spend almost a month participating in the excavation of a couple different Maya sites in the Mopan Valley of Belize. I will be living with other students at Nabitunich, a rural "eco-hostel" that is based in a working ranch near the town of San Ignacio, so I'll be surrounded by animals! One of the bigger sites that I'll get to visit is Xunantunich. I've done research using artifacts from Xunantunich back in the lab at UTSA, so I can't wait to see it in person! According to Wikipedia, the site is haunted; its name translates to "Stone Woman," and in the 18...