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.