It's been a few weeks since the last update, so here goes. In May I went to Maya Day at Tumul Kin School. It was a celebration of Maya cultural life in the district and about 800-1000 people showed up. There were speeches and booths with food such as armadillo and fresh cacao drinks. There were also a lot of competitions in such things as wood splitting (with a machete) and carrying (with a tumpline on the forehead) and tortilla making. Spirits were high and everyone had a good time despite the heat. It was the hottest day I can remember in a while. Shady spots were popular.





One day Ethan and I hiked with a couple friends to the top of the largest hill in the study area to look at some ruins. They were badly looted but the hike as invigorating in the 100 degree plus temperatures. Along the way we passed a really beautiful farm a couple miles off the nearest road. It had a rancho (thatch corn hut) filled with maize and dried pumpkins. Very lovely. People farm in an umber of different ways, with large fields of corn, beans, pumpkin, and rice and smaller gardens near to houses. All this with technology no greater than a machete.









































The rains finally came about a week ago, ending a very long and severe drought. Work has been advancing on two fronts. First, we have been working on climate related projects, mostly monitoring environmental conditions inside a large cave and collecting data (rainfall, temp/RH) in the village. This is all part of a lager project to reconstruct rainfall for the last 2300 years. Most of the monitoring work is electronic, but we have been making pretty regular trips to the cave to check on electronic gear and plates collecting dripwater precipitates. The other part is the archaeological work. Excavations have been going well, but everyone was punished by the heat. We have a lot of small households under excavation and some larger operations in the core public areas of the site. Some of these are large and deep excavations being directed by graduate students.

This was the first week of the 2011 season, getting muddy rubber boots on the ground, thinking about the landscape and the people, gazing at clouds and the changing forest as we transition from dry to wet seasons. It is also the seventh year of the Uxbenka Archaeological Project which I started with a ragged crew of three archaeologists in 2005 at an unknown ancient city and little history to go on. We have grown to a large transdisciplinary research program with a dedicated group of scientists and graduate students from seven universities and one of the most scientifically diverse and socially responsible anthropological projects in the hemisphere. it's a remarkable growth that leaves me in awe every time I think about it. We are on the verge of reconstructing 2000 years of climatic and cultural history at a resolution that could only have been dreamed about a decade ago. This is shaping up to be a season where we really begin to understand how people, here, over a 1200 year period colonized a landscape, developed startling levels of social inequality, intensified their use of resources, and ultimately disintegrated, probably bringing about the demise of their community and collective identity. As this seasons begin I have a few observations that are worth pondering. First is t that we now in a period of incredible change and instability that is more poignant here than anywhere else I have ever been. When I talk to farmers, who clear the land with only a machete (and kin and friends) of the towering forest, they tell me that even the lessons of their grandfathers can't help them predict the periodicity of rain, which brings the corn to fruition. The climate, along with the times, our economic and turbulent desire to materialize our lives at the cost of human connectivness, is dealing creating chaos. People no longer know when the rain will fall. What was once predictable, within a reasonable timeframe is no longer. What this means is that climate change and integration into increasingly economic and social forms is driving change towards a future that is less certain for people here than before. For those of us who study change for living it is a fairly dramatic laboratory to study resilience and the capacity for change in real time. It also has plenty of implications for the understanding the archaeological past.

















A sign at Tumul Kin School, a primarily Maya high school dedicated to the preservation of indigenous traditional knowledge, ecologically sustainable stewardship of the land, and alleviation of social poverty.

Belize 2011 begins with a clap of thunder

Here goes another round of Belize blog posts from muggy, soggy, hot, and sweet Toledo District. Ethan and I flew in two days ago and we're getting our Maya feet back, bo'otik. We were met in Belize City by some typical days' experiences. The layover was several hours long, mostly spent talking with "Jet", the aged 4' 1" tall owner of the local airport pub who has a penchant for snuggling up to the bosom of every womam who come though the door. Its pathological. Hmm. Why do I keep coming back here?

By the time our little puddle jumper to Punta Gorda was ready to depart most of the airport workers were asleep on the tarmac (see the first picture). Ahh, welcome back to the tropics. I feel so much safer flying now.

Once we got here more fun ensued. We stumbled up a large hill yesterday as the rains threatened and the sky grew dark. On the top we found a large collapsing building that had just been burned as Ronaldo was preparing his farm field for the season. This bodes pretty well (the building, not the dark skies) for a fruitful season. But... It's not my first trip here of the season. In early April I was here with our new climate working group from the UK. They took the very posed image of me in the cave we are currently monitoring as part of our long-term paleoclimate study. More soon!

My two co-PIs on the project came to visit and it was a ruckus time, to say the least. Doug somehow managed to arrive right when we went on break, so I took him diving. The seas were choppy, but we managed to see three spotted eels on the second dive of the day. Yemane arrived a coupe days later and my week was divided between getting project business done and guiding the two of them around. It was perhaps the most fun of the season, though I did little work. We're building a house for the ethnographers on the project, and they had to haul lots of palm leaf for the thatch roof. Now we're in the last week of study and I'm looking at 15 hour days until Saturday. Wish me luck!

The heat continues so I'll just quit whining about it after I note that it was only 96 degrees yesterday with about 90% humidity. It was in this heat that I saw a bunch of 7-10 year old boys chopping the grass in front of the school with razor sharp machetes. They get their first machete when they are about seven years old, and those kids were good, clearing the entire hillside in about ten minutes.

We have divided our time for the last week between 5 teams of students excavating small-to-large settlement groups of 1-5 buildings each, mapping, and some side projects. The settlement excavations are the main focus of the last couple weeks of work. As we identify and map in architecture of elites and commons we are also generating spatial data to match the excavations. Here's some pictures of Claire and Neri (mapper in training). We also visited a rather interesting rockshelter up in the karst mountains surrounding the site. We'll do some excavations there on some human-constructed terraces. One drawback was the mosquitos, which were so thick we had to burn an old termite nest at lunch to keep them at bay.

Today and tomorrow I'm at the beach, finally! It's nice to sit by the sea, soaking the bug bites, and enjoy a nice dinner with the ocean breezes. Here's a picture of the view from my balcony (at $45 a night its quite the deal), and I saw an iguana on a hot tin roof.

It has been a busy last few weeks since I updated this blog. We have grown to about 10 people, plus 16 workers excavating at Uxbenka. The work has been exciting, hot, buggy, strenuous, and rewarding. In one plaza set back from the road we have found excavated an Early Classic (ca 400 AD) shrine complex in a large residential complex. We completed excavations at another shrine, far in the mountains, where I brought in an intrepid crew form California, the UK, and Hawaii. Despite the brutal conditions they did a great job documenting what may be the first large mountain shrine complex in the Maya Lowlands. Excavations have produced some really wonderful artifacts and even more interesting information. In between, on our occasional days off people have found time to swim into caves, visit other ruins, and mostly lounge around, enjoying a few cold beers in the evening. We only have three more weeks of work, but I plan to post at least three more blog-posts in that time.

Holley and Mark went up into the hills to camp while excavating a pre-Classic (ca AD 150) mountain shrine complex. We packed all there gear onto horses, including water since its far from the river, and then sent them off. One of the things they did was an experiment to see how hard it would be to move large construction blocks up to the shrine, where thousands of the 50-70 lb stones are incorporated into the buildings. So, we hired several young men to carry as many rocks as they could up the hill. Quite an adventure. Here's some pictures of all that, plus one of some pavers in an excavation at Group I, a large elite residential group far from the site core.