Week 3

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, and open it up with just a pocket knife and his bare hands. It was wild. The coconut milk was delicious though! We also saw some trees that Belizeans call “tourist trees” - they’re called that because they get red and the peel.

Our last stop was supposed to be the Crooked Tree museum, but when we got there at four we found out that it closed at three. The town of Crooked Tree is a Creole community (as opposed to Succotz, which is Maya/Mestizo) and the museum just opened a couple weeks ago to bring more income to the town. It combines both the Pre-Columbian archaeology and Post-Columbian history of the area, so I was pretty disappointed we didn’t get to see it.

On our drive we saw some very mysterious billboards that just said “Belice,” and then it was crossed out and next to it it said “Belize.” Our tour guide said this is because some Guatemalans consider Belize part of Guatemala and call it Belice in Spanish, so these signs are pushing back against that. The relationship between Belize and Guatemala isn’t very good at the moment, and it’s very obvious.

Sunday was the day I realized I truly just don’t care about the bugs anymore. Halfway through my cup of juice at breakfast I saw an ant in my cup, and you know what I did? I just drank it. I don’t know if I’ve adjusted or just given up, but that’s life here. 

We spent most of Sunday at Caracol, which is a Classic Maya site. To get there we had to drive through the mountains on an extremely bumpy road and pass through a military checkpoint. Caracol itself is massive. The city has a five mile radius (not including the hinterlands) and around 100,00 people lived there. It had a lot of enormous pyramids, too, and my legs were very tired from all the steps by the time we left.

On our way back we made two stops. First we went to Rio Frío cave. We got to go inside and it was super cool. Then we went to Big Rock Falls and got to swim right in front of a waterfall. After a long, hot day, the cool water felt amazing. When we got back we ended our night with another bonfire to finish off our s’mores and some stargazing. Without any big cities anywhere near us, you can see a lot of constellations here.

Our relaxing evening was interrupted by a nighttime visitor, though. About five minutes after we turned out the lights, I heard a shriek from one of my roommates. I turned the light back on, and there was a praying mantis on her pillow. It had crawled right across her face! We were all so exhausted we had no trouble going right back to sleep, though.

On Monday we were on our sixth layer of our unit. My blisters healed over the weekend, which I was extremely grateful for. A new type of wound showed up though: bucket bruises. I use my thigh to hoist the buckets up so I can dump them on the screen, and I just have a cluster of about a dozen tiny bruises on my thigh.

And as always, there was a new bug encounter: Africanized bees. In the afternoon as we were digging we just heard this humming noise getting gradually louder and turning into a buzz. A swarm of Africanized bees was flying over us! Regular Belizean bees are pretty chill but with these ones if one stings you, all the rest will chase you down and sting you, too. Luckily these ones moved on and didn’t bother us.

We had yet another fauna problem that afternoon. Our site is actually on private property that’s divided into a bunch of cow pastures. As we were getting ready to leave, we heard the mooing getting closer, and we looked up to see that a bunch of cows had come through a hole in the fence and onto our site. Luckily, one of the guys was able to call the owner of the land and he got them out before they trampled any excavations.

On Tuesday Michael was in the lab again, so I worked with some of the guys on a new unit. Zoe thought there might be a stela, a carved stone monument, in that spot, so we worked on that most of the day. I also learned how to draw a plan map of a lot. I hadn’t realized how much drawing and paperwork goes along with archaeology, but trust me, it’s a lot.

Wednesday morning was incredibly hot, but we dug out another layer of our unit. For lunch we walked to a different part of Xunan to eat with some of our friends, and during lunch it started absolutely pouring rain. When we made it back to our own unit, we saw that the water running off our tarp had formed a stream directly into the unit and we had a puddle at the bottom. That was when Zoe taught us a necessary skill of Central American archaeology: building trenches and walls around our unit to keep the rain out. Then we scooped out the worst of the mud, but it was still too muddy to screen the dirt, so we couldn’t dig anymore. Instead we did some more mapping of units with architecture.

After a long shower to get all the mud off, we got to treat ourselves because Wednesday night means dinner at Benny’s. I got pibiil, the pork dish I got the first week, again because it’s just so delicious.

On Thursday it was my turn to work in the lab. While it’s nice to have a break from digging and hauling buckets, I find the lab work pretty boring. I the morning I washed some mano and metates and obsidian blades, and since there may be organic residue on them we can’t use water, so that means scrubbing a big rock that’s been in the dirt hundreds of years with a toothbrush. Let’s just say it takes a while. In the afternoon I sorted and bagged artifacts that had already been washed and got them ready to be shipped out.

That evening we had a visitor drop in. Like, literally- the lizard that lives under our cabin climbed in under the roof and dropped down onto my bed. Then he decided to hide under my bed in the corner, so it took us a good fifteen minutes to get him out.

After dinner, it was movie night. We watched the Popol Vuh, which is the Maya creation story and the myth of the Hero Twins. The movie is all animated from drawings from Classic Maya pottery, so it’s really cool.

Friday was my last day of field work. Michael and the guys reached bed rock in our unit on Thursday while I was in the lab, so we were completely done with digging. That meant all day Friday we were mapping- we mapped our own unit, the stela unit, and a couple units on the south side of the party platform. Mapping is a very slow process- using two tape measure and a plum bob, you have to take the coordinates of the corners of each rock that forms any architecture in the unit, so that then you can sketch in the lines and graph the structures. It’s tedious, but I don’t mind much.

Leaving work for the last time was definitely bittersweet, but I came out of it with my skin much darker and my arms much stronger. Friday night we celebrated with another movie night and watched Back to the Future.