Letter from An Archaeologist
Dear Brooke,
Greetings from Aguacate, Belize! We’re having so much fun down here doing fieldwork. I never thought I’d be too hot wearing shorts and t-shirts, swimming, and getting a tan in February! This week was particularly exciting. We started surveying a new area of the rainforest looking for signs of Mayan ruins. It’s hilly, humid, and the plants are so thick you need to chop a trail through the jungle with a machete. It’s hard to imagine that you’d ever be able to detect traces of Mayan archaeology under all the vegetation, but if you know where to look and what the clues are, suddenly it pops out!
On Tuesday, we hiked all morning until we found a small hill that had a clearing at the top. We stopped for a short water break at the top and began to poke around looking for broken pottery or other artifacts lying on the ground. I found a few pieces of painted pottery but I couldn’t make out the designs, we’ll have to wait until we wash them back at the lab (a spare room in our field house where we store and wash all the artifacts during the season) before we can tell what they are. When we looked closely around the area, under fallen trees and huge vines, we began to notice that many of the big rocks were actually parts of walls camouflaged by plant cover. Walls and artifacts mean one thing, a Mayan site!! We quickly started clearing the area out with machetes, rakes, and root clippers we could see that we were standing not on a hill, but on the remains of a large building with multiple levels, called terraces. The ancient walls and ceilings had caved in so it mostly looks like a jumble of rock, but by mapping it you can better understand its shape and how they connect. We returned each day this week to continue clearing and mapping the location of walls and artifacts on the surface and next week we’ll start to excavate a part of the site. We’re looking to better understand how and when these buildings were used, so the artifacts we find will help us determine how old the building is, how long people lived there, and what activities they did inside of it. Frequently Mayan people were buried under the floorboards of their homes, so we might even find some burials to excavate which would tell us a lot about the health and lifestyle of the Maya.
Yesterday we had to quit work early because an afternoon storm came in. It rains so hard here in the rainforest that you have to shout to hear each other over the noise, and pours down so thick that you get soaked instantly! Fortunately, it’s so hot here that you don’t really mind it, and the local villagers who guide us every day made us umbrellas out of giant palm leaves to keep us dry.
One month down, two to go! Can’t wait to see what we discover tomorrow.
Hope you’re well! What news from home?
See you soon,
Rebecca
Honest History
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