Graduate Melanie Miller in Belize

This summer I participated in the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project (BVAR). This project focuses on the research of Maya sites in the Belize Valley and it is presently working at three sites: Cahal Pech, Lower Dover, and Baking Pot. I had the opportunity to work at latter two sites.

 I spent the first couple days in San Ignacio, Belize learning the basics of excavation before I went with a group to the remote jungle site of Lower Dover for two weeks. We stayed in cabins in the jungle where we slept with mosquito nets, showered with rain water, and walked with flashlights at night to avoid stepping on tarantulas. The site was about a half mile hike in the jungle from the camp. Lower Dover is a Terminal Classic site where excavations only recently began in 2010. This field season focused on excavating a plaza structure to determine its architecture to establish a chronology of Lower Dover. I helped to excavate a ceramic cache, which also contained faunal remains and obsidian, and then painstakingly re-uncover it with a spray bottle and paintbrush after a torrential downpour covered it in mud. I also worked in another unit to establish the site’s chronology by uncovering as many stratigraphic levels as quickly as possible before the season ended. This involved recognizing when there was a level change and very reluctantly having to break through several plaster floors of the plaza with a pick.

The last two weeks I worked at the site of Baking Pot, which has been under excavation for about 20 years and dates back to the Preclassic Period. Baking Pot is covered by modern farms and we had to navigate through a maze of corn fields to reach the mound under excavation. The objective was to expose the architecture of one structure and determine the mound’s chronology with a test pit that measured around 20 feet at season’s end. Since it was the end of the field season, most of the work at the mound was last minute digging, endless screening, and backfilling. Most of the time I was washing and processing artifacts at the ‘lab’ located on a livestock farm. The lab was really just a barn for storage, the porch of the livestock veterinary office, and the outdoors. Thus, we had some curious four-legged visitors that would attempt to eat or play with our equipment and we periodically had to run for cover whenever a stampede of cattle ran through the lab area while we crossed our fingers that they would not trample our drying racks full of 

artifacts.

On the weekends I visited other Maya sites in Belize and Guatemala. I’m looking forward to participating in another field school next summer, whether it is with BVAR again or another program in Belize. Overall, I learned a lot from my experience in Belize and gained invaluable insight into archaeological fieldwork. Nothing in the classroom can ever completely prepare you for work in the field, but fieldwork offers invaluable experience and the best stories definitely come from the field.

Ben Thomas to lecture on Maya archaeology in Belize

Dr. Ben Thomas, assistant professor at the Berklee College of Music and Program Director for the Archaeological Institute of America, will present "Caves, Chocolate, and Christianity: Maya Archaeology in Belize" on Thursday February 23 at 7:00 pm in the Schroeder Family School of Business Administration Building 170.  Dr. Thomas will speak on his six-year archaeological survey at the Sibun River in Belize.  All are invited to attend!

Student Megan Anderson in Belize

There are two things I learned this summer while participating in the Rio Bravo Archaeological Survey Project Field School in Belize: howler monkeys are a lot less cute at 2 a.m., and doing archaeology in the jungle is one of the most amazing things to experience. For four weeks from the middle of June until the middle of July, I worked on the Maya site Chawak But'o'ob in the Programme for Belize Conservation and Management Area of Belize with a group of twelve other students. Staying in a base camp, we climbed into the back of trucks every morning for the 30-minute ride along the old logging road to our site. Snake guards and machetes in hand, we would march 25 minutes along a footpath into the jungle until we reached the ball court area where were working. The site itself is a commoner site built into an escarpment with residential terraces, water basins, and ritual space. Our team divided into small groups and we were able to open excavations in a basin and in front of two caves. It was neat to uncover pot sherds (and in one case a reptilian whistle) from the pre-classic period and hold a piece of history in your hand, and see the way the rock tumble would have been arranged as a wall. With archaeology, history is a tangible thing, something you can scrape up with a trowel and put into an artifact bag.

I was trained in archaeological survey at the site; I used a total mapping station, working its computer, holding prisms, and cutting down vines with my machete for a clear shot (after a day and a few good laughs at my over-enthusiasm, the native workmen taught me how to wield my tool the right way). The best part of this field school was the director's desire to instill in us the importance of using different disciplines to understand the past. For several days I crashed off-trail through the jungle with a pair of biologists and measured trees. The data they collected were used to understand what the forest would have looked like in pre-classic times.

Belize is a beautiful and interesting country, and the archaeologists who work there are passionate about what they are doing and ager to share that knowledge with students and the world. This field school allowed me to take archaeology out of the classroom and experience it in the real world.

Megan is a junior Archaeology major at UE.