All good things must come to an end. After making my way back from the trip to Belize to my apartment and my lab table, I finally get the news on the excavation permit. Yep, you guessed it. No dice, still.
On Monday, we were supposed to go out to the site to repeat the process that was done five months ago. I waited for her call. She didn't call. I waited patiently. The phone continued to fail to ring. More patience was rewarded with the continued persistence of the silence of the phones.
I called.
"Oh! Crorey! We are all ready to go out to the field, and we'll tell you what happened when we get back."
I don't know why I was excluded. It might have been an attempt to make peace with the landowner without the gringo present. It might have simply been that I had been pretty firm in saying that I had other things to do, and that when I was able, I would be in the lab doing my analysis (who would expect her to take my bluff at face value?)
And so I waited on her to tell me what had happened in the field. I waited, much as I had before. With the same results. Every half hour for both Monday night and Tuesday morning, I checked my phone to make sure that I had not simply missed the ringing of the phone.
In one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes scenes, Calvin has waited forever (ten days) for the arrival of his beanie. He claims to have become jaded - he has completely given up on ever getting the beanie. Hobbes suggests that maybe the mailman made a second delivery when he realized that he had forgotten to deliver the package to Calvin's house. Calvin dashes off to the mailbox, just in case. Hobbes mentions that Calvin is not completely jaded...
And, like Calvin, I had not completely given up on getting the phone call.
But I broke the silence first - I called. And the response was, well, interesting. The owner of the site had put up barbed wire around the site, and steadfastly refused access to the site, even for the head of Petén archaeology.
So much for my idea that the standoff was the result of the archaeologist being a gringo.
Anyway, Adriana could not get into the site to take pictures, and had to file her report without having seen the destruction firsthand (at least that much has not changed). And she was sending her report to the capital on Tuesday, and was asking for a letter giving us access to the site (I put a copy of that request in her hands while she was in Guate last time, but it could not have been requested then – it was necessary to fumble around for another month first).
And then she had to come up with the idea herself. Frightening indeed that all of the sites in Petén are under the protective control of someone who does not know how to go about protecting a site from a single looter. Or even how to legally gain access to the site.
Grump.
And, as if on cue, enter Hilda's sister Noemi (not Ermilda, as I had reported before), stage right, to "help" me with my analysis. She admits right off the bat that she is sad. Why? I ask. My chicken coop burned down last night.
After resisting all barbecue jokes (which took all my concentration), I commiserate with her about the dead chickens, and get down to work. I do a few spot checks, just to make sure that we are on the same page with what is a flake versus what is a core, and I count one of the lots.
She is off by 4 flakes. Not so much, all things considering, but there were not even twenty in the lot. We are off by twenty percent of the total.
I joke with her about it, but it is clear that I want her to shape up. Next batch, she is off again. The following batch, the same. At this point, I start to be pretty stern; it is no benefit to me if I have to redo all of the work of my employee.
I'm sorry, she says. My parents decided to break up last night after forty-two years of marriage. I am a little distracted.
Four major distracted errors later, I ask her what she would do if she were in my position (with a nifty use of the subjunctive, I might add). She pointed out that yesterday and the day before she had counted well for me; she was just having a hard time concentrating.
I sent her to wash lithics.
And when I checked on her work there, I found her doubling up on the baskets again. At this point, I got hot under the collar. This was in direct disregard for something I had made very plain. She excused it with the lack of baskets, at which point I came up with thirty more.
It was a relief when she went home. And my lithics seem to have survived a pretty bad day.
In the afternoon, I went with Matt to the laboratory at the local community college to see if he could find some examples of Postclassic pottery that has been pretty elusive in our area. I tagged along to see if there was any lithic material there that I could look at.
There was. Nine total pieces of chert, including two flakes and six general utility bifaces. Most of my informants have better collections in their windows.
And then on Tuesday, my knight in pressed blue jeans came in. Mario Penado showed up and, in a moment when I was despairing of having competent help, volunteered his services to the tune of 160 hours.
Whew and woohoo!
As part of its degree program, the local university requires its archaeology students to volunteer on two excavation projects and one "cabinet season" where they work with lab materials. One student showed up a couple of weeks ago, and I spent an hour with her, showing her what I was doing. She said she would check with her advisor, and would either call me or show up.
She did neither. I guess that working at Tikal sounds better than working with really crappy stone tool debitage.
But Wednesday, unexpectedly, Mario arrived. After walking him through the process, I took him outside and we banged rocks together for about a half hour – at the end of the session, he had knapped a rough biface. It took me a month before I could do that.
We went back into the lab and cranked through more analysis. With a competent assistant, I can really make good time.
I emphasize the word "competent" because for the entire week, Noemi was simply not up to the task. On Thursday (Mario works half days during the week), I reminded her to be careful. She rechecked the next set, and handed them over, saying "there are 22 pieces here."
I looked at her. Really? Looks like more. A lot more.
"Thirty six, thirty seven, thirty eight, thirty nine."
Fair difference between 22 and 39. And that was being careful.
She offered to quit, and make this her last day. She told me she liked the work, and wanted to keep the job. But she just kept making mistakes. "I counted right," she told me. "I just picked up the wrong paper." And she held up the tally. But then she had to agree that in the end, there was no difference to me – it was all error.
And it never really got up to the level of simple competence. Her best day so far, Friday, found her mixing up baskets with material of different sizes. We screen the material through different size screens, count and weighing each one. And suddenly the basket is filled with flakes of varying size. She just wasn't paying attention when she counted.
I'm not likely to pay attention when I pay her, either. Oops.
Grump, part 2.
Finally, Friday morning, I call and get the good news about the site. Still no dice. We have to wait for Gustavo, who is the inspector of the Motul project, to walk the report through the department of jurisprudence at IDAEH.
First of all, this is not a Motul project. That was the whole point of having a Chapin codirector. It is a Guatemalan project, and is (ostensibly) not subject to the same red tape that gringo-directed projects are.
Secondly, he promised that he would try to put the screws to the legal department on Thursday, so that we could get the permits Friday and start work on Monday.
But he has been promising me this sort of thing for five months now. So we have to wait.
I suggested (again) that we start with the other part of the site, where the landowner is OK with us digging. Adriana reacted as though this was the first time she had heard about this possibility (it was not). She said that it was not covered in the original proposal, and so we would probably have to submit new paperwork (NOOOOO! AUGHHHHHH!) at which point I interrupted and quickly explained that it was the same site. Separated by less than 100m, the two mounds, along with the radio tower site and one other mound, all were likely part of the same operation. Similar signatures + similar lithic debitage + close together = same site. Could she please ask Gustavo if we could just use the same paperwork for both?
Five minutes later, she calls back (she called me this time!). Gustavo says fine.
And just like that, we have switched from bureaucratic mode to field mode. I get to put everything in the back of my car again, and check the hoses and belts, and start calling together my workers.
Wish me luck.
On Monday, we were supposed to go out to the site to repeat the process that was done five months ago. I waited for her call. She didn't call. I waited patiently. The phone continued to fail to ring. More patience was rewarded with the continued persistence of the silence of the phones.
I called.
"Oh! Crorey! We are all ready to go out to the field, and we'll tell you what happened when we get back."
I don't know why I was excluded. It might have been an attempt to make peace with the landowner without the gringo present. It might have simply been that I had been pretty firm in saying that I had other things to do, and that when I was able, I would be in the lab doing my analysis (who would expect her to take my bluff at face value?)
And so I waited on her to tell me what had happened in the field. I waited, much as I had before. With the same results. Every half hour for both Monday night and Tuesday morning, I checked my phone to make sure that I had not simply missed the ringing of the phone.
In one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes scenes, Calvin has waited forever (ten days) for the arrival of his beanie. He claims to have become jaded - he has completely given up on ever getting the beanie. Hobbes suggests that maybe the mailman made a second delivery when he realized that he had forgotten to deliver the package to Calvin's house. Calvin dashes off to the mailbox, just in case. Hobbes mentions that Calvin is not completely jaded...
And, like Calvin, I had not completely given up on getting the phone call.
But I broke the silence first - I called. And the response was, well, interesting. The owner of the site had put up barbed wire around the site, and steadfastly refused access to the site, even for the head of Petén archaeology.
So much for my idea that the standoff was the result of the archaeologist being a gringo.
Anyway, Adriana could not get into the site to take pictures, and had to file her report without having seen the destruction firsthand (at least that much has not changed). And she was sending her report to the capital on Tuesday, and was asking for a letter giving us access to the site (I put a copy of that request in her hands while she was in Guate last time, but it could not have been requested then – it was necessary to fumble around for another month first).
And then she had to come up with the idea herself. Frightening indeed that all of the sites in Petén are under the protective control of someone who does not know how to go about protecting a site from a single looter. Or even how to legally gain access to the site.
Grump.
And, as if on cue, enter Hilda's sister Noemi (not Ermilda, as I had reported before), stage right, to "help" me with my analysis. She admits right off the bat that she is sad. Why? I ask. My chicken coop burned down last night.
After resisting all barbecue jokes (which took all my concentration), I commiserate with her about the dead chickens, and get down to work. I do a few spot checks, just to make sure that we are on the same page with what is a flake versus what is a core, and I count one of the lots.
She is off by 4 flakes. Not so much, all things considering, but there were not even twenty in the lot. We are off by twenty percent of the total.
I joke with her about it, but it is clear that I want her to shape up. Next batch, she is off again. The following batch, the same. At this point, I start to be pretty stern; it is no benefit to me if I have to redo all of the work of my employee.
I'm sorry, she says. My parents decided to break up last night after forty-two years of marriage. I am a little distracted.
Four major distracted errors later, I ask her what she would do if she were in my position (with a nifty use of the subjunctive, I might add). She pointed out that yesterday and the day before she had counted well for me; she was just having a hard time concentrating.
I sent her to wash lithics.
And when I checked on her work there, I found her doubling up on the baskets again. At this point, I got hot under the collar. This was in direct disregard for something I had made very plain. She excused it with the lack of baskets, at which point I came up with thirty more.
It was a relief when she went home. And my lithics seem to have survived a pretty bad day.
In the afternoon, I went with Matt to the laboratory at the local community college to see if he could find some examples of Postclassic pottery that has been pretty elusive in our area. I tagged along to see if there was any lithic material there that I could look at.
There was. Nine total pieces of chert, including two flakes and six general utility bifaces. Most of my informants have better collections in their windows.
And then on Tuesday, my knight in pressed blue jeans came in. Mario Penado showed up and, in a moment when I was despairing of having competent help, volunteered his services to the tune of 160 hours.
Whew and woohoo!
As part of its degree program, the local university requires its archaeology students to volunteer on two excavation projects and one "cabinet season" where they work with lab materials. One student showed up a couple of weeks ago, and I spent an hour with her, showing her what I was doing. She said she would check with her advisor, and would either call me or show up.
She did neither. I guess that working at Tikal sounds better than working with really crappy stone tool debitage.
But Wednesday, unexpectedly, Mario arrived. After walking him through the process, I took him outside and we banged rocks together for about a half hour – at the end of the session, he had knapped a rough biface. It took me a month before I could do that.
We went back into the lab and cranked through more analysis. With a competent assistant, I can really make good time.
I emphasize the word "competent" because for the entire week, Noemi was simply not up to the task. On Thursday (Mario works half days during the week), I reminded her to be careful. She rechecked the next set, and handed them over, saying "there are 22 pieces here."
I looked at her. Really? Looks like more. A lot more.
"Thirty six, thirty seven, thirty eight, thirty nine."
Fair difference between 22 and 39. And that was being careful.
She offered to quit, and make this her last day. She told me she liked the work, and wanted to keep the job. But she just kept making mistakes. "I counted right," she told me. "I just picked up the wrong paper." And she held up the tally. But then she had to agree that in the end, there was no difference to me – it was all error.
And it never really got up to the level of simple competence. Her best day so far, Friday, found her mixing up baskets with material of different sizes. We screen the material through different size screens, count and weighing each one. And suddenly the basket is filled with flakes of varying size. She just wasn't paying attention when she counted.
I'm not likely to pay attention when I pay her, either. Oops.
Grump, part 2.
Finally, Friday morning, I call and get the good news about the site. Still no dice. We have to wait for Gustavo, who is the inspector of the Motul project, to walk the report through the department of jurisprudence at IDAEH.
First of all, this is not a Motul project. That was the whole point of having a Chapin codirector. It is a Guatemalan project, and is (ostensibly) not subject to the same red tape that gringo-directed projects are.
Secondly, he promised that he would try to put the screws to the legal department on Thursday, so that we could get the permits Friday and start work on Monday.
But he has been promising me this sort of thing for five months now. So we have to wait.
I suggested (again) that we start with the other part of the site, where the landowner is OK with us digging. Adriana reacted as though this was the first time she had heard about this possibility (it was not). She said that it was not covered in the original proposal, and so we would probably have to submit new paperwork (NOOOOO! AUGHHHHHH!) at which point I interrupted and quickly explained that it was the same site. Separated by less than 100m, the two mounds, along with the radio tower site and one other mound, all were likely part of the same operation. Similar signatures + similar lithic debitage + close together = same site. Could she please ask Gustavo if we could just use the same paperwork for both?
Five minutes later, she calls back (she called me this time!). Gustavo says fine.
And just like that, we have switched from bureaucratic mode to field mode. I get to put everything in the back of my car again, and check the hoses and belts, and start calling together my workers.
Wish me luck.
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