Place of the Ticks

The day after ATM, I got up early and went to Cahal Pech, or Place of the Ticks. It was inhabited from 1000 BC - 800 AD as a mid-sized regional center. Eventually it lost political prominence to nearby Buena Vista, but both these cities were probably under the domain of massive Xunantunich. Despite the creepy name, it is a lovely site built on a steep hill overlooking San Ignacio. Anna's project has breakfast at 6:30 every morning and is at work by 7, so I got up there really early. I even beat the archaeologists there - they were coming up the hill as I was leaving! But it meant that I had the place entirely to myself on a misty morning, which is the best way to experience a site, in my opinion. The reconstructions are beautiful, even though I hear that some liberties were taken in the interpretation. In any case, the elite residential groups actually had staircases and corbel vaulted passageways, which were fun to explore. Here are the pictures:

And here is the view of San Iganacio from the road to Cahal Pech:

Spelunking at Actun Tunichil Muknal

Last weekend I forgot to write about the day-trip that Anna and I had in San Ignacio! After the conference in Belize City I had a weekend to kill before heading to Copan, so I went to visit Anna's project in San Ignacio. While I was there we decided to embark on our first spelunking adventure.

I should apologize now for overusing the word "spelunking", but it's been one of my favorite words ever since I learned what it meant from my Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego computer game in 1992. Anyways, Belize has a wide array of caves, from rock shelters to massive subterranean chambers. The Maya thought that caves were sacred portals to the underworld, and so you tend to find ancient offerings and burials inside them; cave archaeology is huge in Belize. There is a particularly fantastic cave outside of San Ignacio called Actun Tunichil Muknal (or ATM if you don't want to wrap your tongue around that). It has been excavated, but the Institute of Archaeology decided to leave the artifacts in it and develop it for tourism into an in situ museum of sorts. It costs a lot to take a tour ($75US), but you can get $10 knocked off if you're an archaeologist! So we decided it would be worth the money.

Was it ever! First, you hike a couple miles, fording the same river three times, until you get to the mouth of the cave. Here's Anna fording the river (I don't know why it's so blurry!):

And here we are at the mouth of the cave:

From this point I don't have many pictures because we had to literally jump into the pool of water at the mouth of the cave and swim across it to a rock outcrop. From there you hike into the cave, across rock shelves, squeezing through narrow passageways, wading across rivers and swimming through pools of water. Our guide, Ben, was awesome. He's worked with lots of different archaeology projects over the years, so he knows everything about the archaeology of the area. And he knew all about the geology of cave formation, which was interesting to learn about. The journey itself was really most of the fun. When you get to the cavern and you have to scale a couple of steeply tumbled boulders and then remove your shoes. You have to wear socks so you'll walk softly around the artifacts and not damage anything. Or if you're Anna, and you forget to bring socks, you can also go barefoot.

The floor of the cavern is a tiered maze of calcite pools that slopes gently upward towards the back of the cave with numerous clustered offerings of pots. The pots are not just on the floor, but in niches in the walls, on shelves and ledges along the sides of the cavern, and lined up underneath rocky overhangs. Many of the pots have been punctured or smashed entirely to release the spirits called on during rituals. Water runs over the area seasonally so everything is frozen from calcification. The cave was used from 100 - 1000 AD, with the older offering located at the front of the cavern and the more recent at the very back. Caves were thought to be the entrance to the watery underworld, and also the domain of the rain god, Chaak. The offerings increase during the Terminal Classic period (800-1000 AD) when there was a drought. There are also 14 burials laid out among the pots, 7 adults and 7 children under the age of five. You can't really see all 14 burials, since some of then have been severely damaged or not well-preserved, but you can see a few. The idea is that they were all sacrificed to Chaak in hopes of ending periods of drought. I'm always skeptical when people talk about human sacrifice. The Maya used caves and rock shelters to bury people who died from many other causes. Sacrifice may be true in this case, but I always take that with a grain of salt.

Since it was a dark cave, my pictures are only mediocre. These are the best ones; hopefully you can get a feeling for how unique this place is: At the very back of the cavern you climb a slightly off-kilter aluminum ladder and make your way into a small room with the skeleton of a young woman inside it. They call her "The Crystal Maiden" because the calcite that has preserved her sparkles when you shine a light on it. It is pretty spectacular:
They think she was bludgeoned and left for dead. The sacrifice argument makes sense in this case. It is difficult enough to maneuver yourself through the small passages and up the slick rocks - it would virtually impossible to do so carrying a dead body. It makes you think about the nature of the sacrifice; did she walk in to the cave knowing she was to be killed? Did she volunteer? If you're going to talk about ritual killing it's much more interesting to think about the complex circumstances of the sacrificed and the sacrificers instead of the blind, fanatical, Mel Gibson-style blood bath that is usually associated with human sacrifice.

It was such a great adventure, and I was exhausted when we got back to San Ignacio. It was so much fun I'm going to try to figure out a way to do more spelunking during my time here. I know there are plenty of caves to be explored in Toledo, I just have to find a way to get out to them.

Copan and MACHI - Arte Accion

The second leg of my July trip consisted of a visit to Copan, Honduras to meet up with Shoshi and see how the Honduran branch of MACHI does things. The trip was really long - I went straight from Belize City, spending only one night in PG on my way south. The day after the five hour ride from Belize City, I got on the morning boat to Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, then caught another five hour bus to Chiquimula (what a gorgeous drive that was! I love Guatemala), then a rapidito (a minivan that drops people off along a specific route) to the border. When I got to the Honduran border it was closed (yikes), so I had to pay the security guard 100 quetzales (about $13US) to take me into Copan.

But I finally got there and met up with Shoshi in the AWESOME place we were staying -- the people at the hotel (which is adorable anyways) messed up our reservation and ended up giving us an entire house that they usually rent to groups! We each had our own rooms, bathrooms, and balconies, plus a cute patio, fully stocked kitchen, and comfy living room. Here is a picture of my room and the view from my balcony:




After a delicious HOT shower we went and ate American comfort food and drank fluffy cocktails; it was the perfect end to a long sweaty day.

The local NGO Arte Accion is our contact in Copan; they do art-based educational classes for kids in Copan and the surrounding villages. Arte Accion is run by Carin Steen an energetic, highly creative Dutch woman who has lived in Central America for about 12 years. She is amazing and the work she has done with MACHI is one of the most successful of our four programs. Hers is also the most similar to the program I'm trying to set up in Toledo, so it was really key for me to see what she's done and how she's done it. They have trained a couple younger Maya guys (Londin and Moises) to go to the communities and teach fourth and fifth graders with a handbook Carin made about the Maya site of Copan, and through creative art projects. Copan also has remodeled their children's museum, moving it into a restored fort overlooking town. We visited the museum with Londin, who was teaching a class there and then leading the kids through the museum.






This last picture is a headdress that Londin was using to teach the kids about the founding king of Copan, Yax K'uk Mo'. The feathers have questions on them, and he passes the feathers out to different children, and then has them ask the questions.
The museum itself is pretty neat. It is the inspiration for the mobile museum idea that we're trying enact in Toledo. I'm not sure I've mentioned that before -- Cristina (director of Julian Cho Society, also my roommate) wants to try to renovate a bus and make it into a mobile museum that can visit the rural communities. I'll be writing much more about this idea later on, but the Copan museum is the inspiration. Here are some pictures of the exhibits on architecture, the calendar, stelae, gods, and the ballgame:


While it's not perfect, the exhibits are interactive and durable (i.e., they work even when the power is out) and the kids that I saw go through it had a great time. After the museum they played a game, had a snack, and explored the fort. Shoshi and I climbed one of the towers:

It was actually really nice to be in back in Honuras; obviously I took a lot of pictures! That evening we had a slightly random dinner crew, Shoshi, myself, Carin, and an ethnographer named Lincoln who I had met once during a previous Copan trip, and Ricardo Aguercia, who is the head of archaeology in Copan. We had had a meeting with him earlier, and he had some more ideas for us so he met us out at the restaurant. Copan is a fun town, touristy, but in a refreshing way if you've been without variety in food choices for about a month. There is also a bar scene, that I'm sure gets old if you live there, but I have always enjoyed it. I enjoyed it a bit too much that night, so I don't have any pictures of the trip we made to a village the next morning! It was a bit rough getting in a crowded cab at 7:15 am after only two hours of sleep.....

Anyways, after some rest that night, we got up and went with Londin to Boca del Monte, the next village he was teaching in. Thank God I wasn't hung over because the trip up to this town was long and soggy, as you can see in this picture of our cab fording a puddle-lake:

But it was absolutely gorgeous. We took a cab as far as we could, and then hiked the rest of the way on trails. There is a road, but it goes around the long way so we took a few short cuts. Here's what it looked like:
It was a nice hike. We watched Londin do his talk with the headdress about the kings of Copan, and then the kids got to make their own headdresses, which was really fun. I made one too, but luckily no one got a picture of me with it on. :)


It was fun to watch a MACHI program in action! Londin has become a very skilled teacher, using songs and other creative tools to get the kids involved. All in all it was a fun morning. We had a longer meeting with Carin later that day, and then had dinner at her house. She lives up the hill from downtown Copan in a gorgeous house with a tower.


After a delicious dinner with Carin we went out for another night on the town. The next day Shoshi and I took a bus to San Pedro Sula; she had a flight out of there, and I wanted to take a different route home to see if it was any faster. The bus ride was very pleasant, despite the vampire slasher movie that was playing on the TVs. I'd forgotten how pretty Honduras is, especially in the rainy season. The place we stayed in SPS was straight out of the twilight zone. It's apartment-style buildings were painted bright yellow and lined up in eerie square blocks. It's close to the airport, which is the only reason I can think of to stay there. There were a couple big mission groups there too, which is also kind of creepy; they always wear the same T-shirts and speak really loud English to the waiters in the restaurant. The highlight of that place was the pancake breakfast I had. :)

So I tried the Honduran route back to Belize, and alas it is not faster at all. In fact it may even be longer. I spent hours on a variety of buses trying to get to the Guatemalan border, which is this really wide border crossing with only five people milling about offering terrible exchange rates for your lempiras; kind of odd. I finally got to Puerto Barrios, but I'd missed the last boat to PG, so I had to spend the night there. I was not excited about it; Puerto Barrios is a deep-water banana shipping port and not much more. I had a helpful cab driver that drove me around looking for a place to stay, everywhere had signs saying things like, "No ladies of the night allowed", and "No weapons allowed in the hotel". I had seen a sign on the highway for a resort, and decided that since I was traveling alone it might be a good idea to shell out the money for a nice, safe hotel room. So that's what I did. It didn't turn out to be all that expensive, and I slept very well in the A/C!

Now that I'm back in PG it's time to get down to business. I'm trying to organize a summer movie night to happen in each of the eight communities we'll be in during the fall. It will serve as an introduction to our program, and the whole community will get to see a movie about the ancient Maya. I also have to pick up the training for Morvin on different aspects of Maya culture and archaeology, and start designing the workshops for the fall. Tricia, my adivsor, is also visiting this week, so I'll be meeting with her to discuss how the project is going.

Here's a few parting pictures of the cacti and communal patio at our hotel in Copan (it's Casa de Cafe in case anyone is interested!).

Archaeology Symposium

After my eventful trip to Belize City, I met up with Anna at the Princess, a resort-ish hotel with the only movie theater in the entire country. It's comfortable, but overpriced and sort of run-down. But I was glad to be there because I was sick for the first three days of my trip. I missed the first day of the conference because I was in bed, close to my bathroom. Anna missed it too, actually, since she was madly working on her presentation for the next day.

The conference itself was great, which I honestly wasn't expecting. It's a small conference in an auditorium, where presenters talk one at a time instead of in panels or groups. I liked it because the madness of the bigger conferences is overwhelming sometimes, and means that you're always missing something. They also had more coffee breaks worked into the schedule, which for me made it easier to stick around. Anyways, it was nice to see who's working where, and to meet new people. I reconnected with the folks from the Uxbenka project, which was fun, and met the people that Anna works with over at Chan, among others. It's funny because Anna and I have been in the field together for a couple years now, but there's always people who haven't met us, or who know one of us but not the other, which makes for some interesting twin scenarios.

I've always said that we're about the worst twins ever, because we just have these boring answers when people ask us about being twins. We've never really used it to our advantage, never really switched places or tricked boys (except poor Joe last year; he was a good sport!). So it was kind of interesting at the conference because in this atmosphere where everyone's trying to meet people, make contacts, or just makes themselves memorable with the powers that be, we actually stand out! If you meet one of us you'll recognize the other, which is a nice opening if you want to meet someone new (or if they want to meet you); we've met people on our independent projects as well so it's easy to meet lots of new people in a short period of time. We really took advantage of the twin-ness this time around. A certain government official was fairly interested in the fact that we were twins working in his country for the summer, which can't be a bad thing; you never know when you're going to need him to remember your name and your project!

And what can I say...we're fun to go out dancing with! Here's some pictures from the post-conference cocktail party and the debauchery that followed (inspired by the bottle of rum that Anna swiped from the open bar as it was closing!).

Debauchery participants: Anna and I; Anna and Nick, who does lithics on Anna's project; Willa and Mark who I met in Toledo at the Uxbenka Project; I think that's Jim Garber and an unidentified lady-friend; Anna and her dance partner for the evening, Joshua.

Lesson learned - when in doubt, hold it

The annual Belize Archaeology Symposium was held a couple of weeks ago in Belize City. Since I'm new to the country and its archaeology I decided to take the bus up there to see what's been going on in Belizean archaeology over the past year. Anna had just arrived to begin work on her project in San Ignacio, so I got to stay with her at the Princess. I need to back up though, and tell you about my very eventful trip up to Belize City.

So there is only one express bus to Belize City per day from PG, and it is well worth the 6 am departure time. The other buses, besides being unable to reach 50 mph anyways, stop at every town, house, barn, and crossroads between PG and Belize, stretching the 4-5 hour trip into a boring and hot 6-7 hour slog. So I got up early and caught my bus, despite some terrible stomach cramps that had developed over night. Now, I'm a big believer in using a bathroom whenever it is available, so I always get off the bus for several minutes to use the bathroom at Mango Creek and Dangriga (the express bus makes three stops, actually), which is never a problem and was quite necessary since I was feeling bad. The bus also stops in Belmopan for a five minute break, but the bathroom at that bus station is so hard to find - it's like outside around the corner, down a hallway that is hidden behind a barbershop. Well, it took me about 5 minutes to find it and of course I had to wait in line, and since it was so early my mind was just not working. When I came back to get on the bus.......it was gone. Do you want to know what I had brought with me for my trip? My passport, my new laptop, some traveler's checks, my wallet with my driver's license, credit and debit card (I had packed for two weeks that included a journey to Honduras!).

The bus guys kind of laughed at me and said that I'd better catch the slow bus leaving for Belize right then. I had to run to catch it; thank god I had some spare money in my pocket for the bathroom toll. You can imagine how tortuous that bus ride was - I was trying to keep calm, trying to plan how I would replace my stuff, which was surely by this time either long gone or sitting on the ground outside the bus station in Belize. Belmopan is only an hour from Belize, so that was good. The minute we hit the outskirts I got off and caught a cab to take me to the bus station, and then to the random location where they park the buses before the afternoon return to PG. You will never believe what happened.

I finally found the bus, climbed on, and saw all my stuff - computer, backpack, purse, wallet - sitting on the front seat. The driver was very apologetic, saying that he'd noticed I was gone five minutes after they left Belmopan. I told him it was no one's fault but my own, and that I should have been paying closer attention. It was incredible. I took a cab to my air conditioned hotel and immediately had a rum and coke to relax. Since then my bus rides have been liquid-free affairs with nothing but some cookies or plantain chips to eat; I haven't gotten off a single one until I've reached my final stop!