"Fortunately, I have a lot of training in survey archaeology in northern Yucatán. Mostly, what that entails is preparing your day, having a backup plan fir when the first plan fails, having an alternate to the first backup for the screw-up that keeps you from undertaking the backup, and three choices that follow the alternate to the backup to the plan. In survey, there is always a day when the workers do not show up or the landowner gives you problems or a one-armed axe-wielding man cuts down a tree that keeps you from getting to the site (no kidding – it happened!). Having contingency plans keeps you from losing your day. And if all else fails, there is always lab work."
On Thursday, I ran out of contingency plans. Leading up to Thursday was a drama combining elements from Anton Chekhov and Sartre.
Cast of characters:
A half a year. Yep, that is right. Six months. I read back through my journal from last year to make sure. In August, we called Pedro and Gustavo to say that the landowner would not let us onto the site to dig a 2x2, and asked if he would come and speak to Miguel Angel, asking again for permission to dig. The lithic site, we explained, is 1) rare, 2) in a residentially developing area, and 3) being looted heavily.
A half year later, and I am still the only person who has spoken to the owner, and we are still denied permission to dig the site. The pretense that the legal department is even involved has now been dropped; for fear that we might call over there and ask who has received the paperwork. Everyone has a different story they tell me. I heard that Yvon was letting Gustavo into Salvador's office to look for the letter that Salvador was supposed to write. Yvon, by odd coincidence, was in Petén at the moment, and had been for the entire week. At a conference, along with Adriana, who is ducking my calls and wishing the &%*#$ pesky gringo had never come to Guatemala. We go to the field, secure in the knowledge that everyone is working doubletime to fix the problem. And that it will be solved by the time we have finished the first unit.
Sure.
But I headed to the field anyway, full of hope and promises.
The digging went slowly both Monday and Tuesday, but for different reasons. Monday morning, I just had the guys clear and dig six small tests just outside of a large lithic scatter (the only place I had obtained permission to dig). Sure, there was some debitage, but there was also obsidian and pottery and pieces of shell and even an ear flare.
It was not terribly impressive.
As we were finishing the unproductive units, Don Paco requested and received permission for us to excavate on his niece's land (he is the caretaker for the land). And it has a large chert workshop that just catches the edge of the property.
One big 2x2 excavation unit, coming right up.
But not going down terribly fast. We started, and the combination of the huge quantity of debitage and the black much we were digging through meant we were going incredibly slowly. Which was OK, considering that with the quantity of material we were finding required me to start buying gunny sacks. We filled five by the end of the first day – after four hours of painfully slow digging.
Tuesday we went another 15 cm into the black much. And filled twelve more gunny sacks with material. And we had cut the unit in half, concentrating on the half with more material. All of that from a 1x2 meter unit. And my front tires were not touching the ground when I drove off at the end of the day.
Adriana, who was at a conference and was unavailable for work, had sent Miguelito in her stead. He had marveled at the material. He was impressed. He helped pick lithic debitage out of the clay-encrusted screens for a couple of hours.
And then he got bored, found a place to lie down, and went to sleep. On the way home, he told me, "I haven't heard from Adriana, and I just don't think you are going to have a problem tomorrow. It is only chert, after all. So I don't think you will need me along."
The reaction he got was akin to what you would expect from a proud father of a newborn, if you were to tell him "It's only a baby, after all."
Hmph. I gave him a half-joking earful about the importance of chert in determining regional economic patters and the differences between elite and non-elite and the functional redundancy of farmers in a society with mechanical solidarity…
But the sad truth is, he is right. Except for the poor deluded jerk that is digging like mad through a chert deposit to see what it is that the gringo is looking for, nobody is likely to disturb a chert mound to haul the material away. And, sadly, nobody, not even the archaeologists, care about chert.
Especially Guatemalan archaeologists. Tuesday afternoon after work, Papatulo and I wander the landscape trying to locate landowners who will give us permission to dig a unit into their chert mound. Everybody is either working or hiding, and we find nobody. I am not worried. By Wednesday afternoon we should finish up the excavation, draw profiles and backfill, and be able to move on to the next locus Thursday morning. So I still have a day to get my fourth-tier backup plan up and running.
Wednesday is just as predicted. After excavating the last part of the lens of dense debitage (see photo of washed lithics from a 10-cm level from a 1x2), we closed the unit and went to talk to landowners.
The result is that I have now received three negative responses, in addition to Don Angel's original refusal. The sad part is that because the government dragged its feet on writing a letter to protect a site that means nothing to it, people all over are denying entrance to their property, thinking that there are no repercussions to breaking the law. The sites are doomed to development anyway, but now people are looking to cash in on the looting operations, denying the government the right to conduct salvage excavations, and then build their house. No information. No preservation. And no possibility of future study.
It is enough to break your heart.
And I got one positive response. So my fourth-tier backup plan has teeth, and we can keep working. The guy's land butts against Don Angel/Diablo's land and has some lithic material. No illegal excavations there show how thick the lens is, but surface lithics are pretty heavy. But as I recall, the edge of the looter pit, a mere five feet away from our excavation unit, showed a pretty thin lens in this corner of the site.
The 1x2m excavation was productive for about 35 cm, and then the lens petered out. The lithics were much more randomly sorted than at the other scatter, with size ranging from big flakes and broken tools to minuscule flakes that go through the screen.
It is nice to get away from the black clay. This nice 10YR5/2 silt is a dream to screen. And to dig – the guys gave me writer's cramp trying to keep up with the bags. I was writing nonstop as the excavators would hand up a bucket full of dirt, the screeners would dump it in the screen, blowing dust everywhere, and pull out the three non-artifacts, before dumping it all in the chert bag. I have never been a part of faster excavations.
Still no bone or antler, and not much in the way of hammerstones. So I am not sure that this is a workshop (rather than a dump; see arguments below), but by 10:00 am we have finished excavating, and it seems pointless to open another unit in the same place. After profiling and backfilling, my bureaucrazy manipulations begin in earnest. I have now officially run out of backups.
Adriana, says Miguel (he is back in the field with us), will be back in the office Monday, can get the letter taken care of then. Antonia calls Gustavo, who says that the letter has to be written by Salvador, who is not in the office (he is in Petén), but he is getting Yvon to let him into S's office with her key to see if he can find the letter and get Yvon to sign it.
But Yvon is in Petén, too, at the meetings at Sayaxche with Adriana. So nobody can sign it, but Gustavo left the letter that he wrote, typed up, with Aurora, Salvador's secretary. As soon as Salvador comes in he will sign it, it will get faxed over to me, and we will be in business.
But since Salvador was in the field on Thursday and traveling, he will likely not come in until Monday.
Which leaves me Friday, Saturday and Sunday where I am looking like a hind tit on a boar hog - absolutely useless. And hemorrhaging money, as I pay the guys to wash lithics rather than dig. After two days of bringing home all the material, I had to find a different place to keep the stuff, since the garage at the lab was filling up too fast for Antonia's comfort. We started storing it in a small shed in at a friend's house in San José. We did get the sixteen gunny sacks of material washed in eight hours, after which I turn the guys loose for the weekend. We hope to start work again on Monday.
So the politicking begins again. Salvador is supposed to come in to the office, and he will sign the letter (supposing it even exists).
On the way home, while fixing a blowout, I receive a call from Antonia. The fax did come. It names Adriana only as the investigator of the project (fine) and says that there are repercussions for refusal. Don Angel has to give us permission to dig, or he risks a denuncio, which could lead to his land being seized by the government.
I leave a message for Adriana (who is still ducking my calls) and tell her that she needs to pick up the fax so that we can take it with us when we (she and I) go to the owner's house on Monday to present him with the letter.
Thirty minutes later (the jack I borrowed from a passing motorist does not lift the car, and I am waiting for help from the lab) I get a call from Miguelito, who is going with me to the field, instead of Adriana.
"But it is not your name on the letter. It is hers. She needs to go." I am firm on this point. But he is the messenger, and not the source of the news. I call Adriana back, and leave a less coherent message about the need for the project directora to be at the site when the fight begins.
Fifteen minutes later she calls me back. She has decided that since her name is on the letter, it would be better if she were to go with me to talk to the landowner, just to avoid any unpleasantness (what a brilliant idea – why didn't I think of that?). The problem is, she has an 8:30 meeting back at the office.
No problem, I counter. We leave at 6:00 am, drive out there, talk to the landowner, and drive back; she can be back in more than enough time to get breakfast and still make her meeting.
I hear the flinch on the other side of the line. But she concedes the point. I just need to pick her up at 6, and then Miguelito can stay with me for the rest of the day, as the IDAEH representative.
So now I can prepare for fieldwork with the actual hope of getting the last couple of days of my work done. A minor miracle. And one in which I still have little faith.
There were wonderful parts to the week. The excavations went smoothly, and we got an amazing quantity of material. A decision I made weeks ago about field meals has paid wonderful dividends. Don Paco always brought the best food to the field, and I asked his wife to prepare extra meals for me and whomever from IDAEH accompanies me. Twice we ended up eating lunch at her table, and while the other guys were eating cold tortillas and drinking coffee out of a poison-bottle-turned-thermos (see pictures of Don Arturo and his coffee thermos), Paco and I ate like kings. And on the other days, she sent a patojo (Guatemalan slang for a little kid) out with the hot food for us. Barbecued chicken wings, rice and vegetables, every day something different. And fresh, hot tortillas.
Never again will I accept cold congealed egg-and-nondescript veggie lunches when I can have the daily special brought to me hot and fresh and delicious.
Another wonderful aspect to the week's work was Mario. Without any additional guidance, he has followed the procedure for analyzing the lithics, and has already completed a gunnysack full from the material we dug up this week. He comes in, works hard, and even asked if he can use this material as the basis for an undergraduate thesis.
Which means we work on the material together, we write it up together, and we publish it together. He benefits, I benefit, and the stuff gets published. And possibly most importantly, I get someone who likes lithics to bounce ideas off of. We talk about how the stuff was made, we talk about what we expect to be different, and he provides me with a foil for some of my arguments.
The beauty of nature on the way to and from the site has also provided a nice boost at the beginning and end of the day. I leave before the sun rises, and get back after the sun sets, so I actually see the sunrise and sunset on the lake every day. It is beautiful, and I almost succeeded in getting the perfect photo of net fishers in the lake with a glorious sunset in the background (see photos of sunrise, sunset, and fishing).
The final exciting thing that happened was that my employee got disgusted and quit. Hooray! She got tired of Fredy's attitude towards her and Hugo, and gave an ultimatum. I paid her for her work, and was not the least bit sorry to show her to the gate.
Now if I can just get rid of Hugo so easily.
*Addendum for the archaeologists. The first unit we dug, in the black clay, was almost certainly the result of secondary deposition of artifacts. Even as dense as the midden was, and as heavy as the concentrations of small flakes was, the fact remains that the lithics were dumped there after a cleanup of the workshop. There were small patches of very large flakes. There were small concentrations of small flakes. There was a small lens of ceramic material, dumped in a lens to one side. There was no size sorting, and no layering. It was as though the cleanup of the workshop (probably just up the hill on another person's land) was done by the basketload. First you clear the largest flakes, dumping them into the basket. Next you scoop up the small to medium flakes, and dump them. Finally you sweep, getting all the small ones. Broken pottery also gets dumped. And where would you dump such nasty stuff? Where is nobody walking?
The clayey bog just downslope.
The other deposition event we have excavated so far – the far side of the mound from Don Diablo's land – is likely primary deposition. I will not be sure of that until I see the soil samples, but it seems more likely, given the size sorting and mixing. It also seems unlikely that workshop debris would be dumped at the apex of a natural hill. More likely this was the location of knapping. Only the presence of the now-destroyed building makes me doubt. Sure would be nice to dig on the other side, where the lens is thick…
On Thursday, I ran out of contingency plans. Leading up to Thursday was a drama combining elements from Anton Chekhov and Sartre.
Cast of characters:
- Salvador – aloof, grumpy, head of archaeology and monuments of Guatemala. Unreachable except through the efforts of the high priestess (i.e. secretary) Aurora
- Yvon – Extra grumpy subdirectora of archaeology and monuments in Guatemala (responsible for numerous delays and issues in the 2005 season)
- Gustavo – once friend of the project, now unreachable head inspector of Guatemalan archaeology. Currently on a three-month vacation from work while completing analysis requirements for his bachelor's degree.
- Pedro – semi-retired ex-head of archaeology in Petén. While preferring to remain uninvolved, Pedro, once motivated, can be a powerful friend.
- Adriana – new replacement for Pedro. Nice, but very inexperienced. In way over her head for her first assignment of babysitting a small gringo investigation.
- Miguelito – employee of IDAEH Petén, congenital achondroplastic dwarfism. Very nice, helpful, amiable guy with a sixth grade education and almost no power in the department. Babysitter proxy for Adriana.
- Antonia – Director of the Motul de San José project. Tenured professor at Williams College; good egg, great archaeologist, but not good at wielding a baseball bat against the bureaucracies of the world.
- Crorey – Field archaeologist by day, lithic analyst by night. Negotiator of the most intricate bureaucracies, able to cut through red tape in a single half-year.
A half a year. Yep, that is right. Six months. I read back through my journal from last year to make sure. In August, we called Pedro and Gustavo to say that the landowner would not let us onto the site to dig a 2x2, and asked if he would come and speak to Miguel Angel, asking again for permission to dig. The lithic site, we explained, is 1) rare, 2) in a residentially developing area, and 3) being looted heavily.
A half year later, and I am still the only person who has spoken to the owner, and we are still denied permission to dig the site. The pretense that the legal department is even involved has now been dropped; for fear that we might call over there and ask who has received the paperwork. Everyone has a different story they tell me. I heard that Yvon was letting Gustavo into Salvador's office to look for the letter that Salvador was supposed to write. Yvon, by odd coincidence, was in Petén at the moment, and had been for the entire week. At a conference, along with Adriana, who is ducking my calls and wishing the &%*#$ pesky gringo had never come to Guatemala. We go to the field, secure in the knowledge that everyone is working doubletime to fix the problem. And that it will be solved by the time we have finished the first unit.
Sure.
But I headed to the field anyway, full of hope and promises.
The digging went slowly both Monday and Tuesday, but for different reasons. Monday morning, I just had the guys clear and dig six small tests just outside of a large lithic scatter (the only place I had obtained permission to dig). Sure, there was some debitage, but there was also obsidian and pottery and pieces of shell and even an ear flare.
It was not terribly impressive.
As we were finishing the unproductive units, Don Paco requested and received permission for us to excavate on his niece's land (he is the caretaker for the land). And it has a large chert workshop that just catches the edge of the property.
One big 2x2 excavation unit, coming right up.
But not going down terribly fast. We started, and the combination of the huge quantity of debitage and the black much we were digging through meant we were going incredibly slowly. Which was OK, considering that with the quantity of material we were finding required me to start buying gunny sacks. We filled five by the end of the first day – after four hours of painfully slow digging.
Tuesday we went another 15 cm into the black much. And filled twelve more gunny sacks with material. And we had cut the unit in half, concentrating on the half with more material. All of that from a 1x2 meter unit. And my front tires were not touching the ground when I drove off at the end of the day.
Adriana, who was at a conference and was unavailable for work, had sent Miguelito in her stead. He had marveled at the material. He was impressed. He helped pick lithic debitage out of the clay-encrusted screens for a couple of hours.
The reaction he got was akin to what you would expect from a proud father of a newborn, if you were to tell him "It's only a baby, after all."
Hmph. I gave him a half-joking earful about the importance of chert in determining regional economic patters and the differences between elite and non-elite and the functional redundancy of farmers in a society with mechanical solidarity…
But the sad truth is, he is right. Except for the poor deluded jerk that is digging like mad through a chert deposit to see what it is that the gringo is looking for, nobody is likely to disturb a chert mound to haul the material away. And, sadly, nobody, not even the archaeologists, care about chert.
Especially Guatemalan archaeologists. Tuesday afternoon after work, Papatulo and I wander the landscape trying to locate landowners who will give us permission to dig a unit into their chert mound. Everybody is either working or hiding, and we find nobody. I am not worried. By Wednesday afternoon we should finish up the excavation, draw profiles and backfill, and be able to move on to the next locus Thursday morning. So I still have a day to get my fourth-tier backup plan up and running.Wednesday is just as predicted. After excavating the last part of the lens of dense debitage (see photo of washed lithics from a 10-cm level from a 1x2), we closed the unit and went to talk to landowners.
The result is that I have now received three negative responses, in addition to Don Angel's original refusal. The sad part is that because the government dragged its feet on writing a letter to protect a site that means nothing to it, people all over are denying entrance to their property, thinking that there are no repercussions to breaking the law. The sites are doomed to development anyway, but now people are looking to cash in on the looting operations, denying the government the right to conduct salvage excavations, and then build their house. No information. No preservation. And no possibility of future study.
It is enough to break your heart.
And I got one positive response. So my fourth-tier backup plan has teeth, and we can keep working. The guy's land butts against Don Angel/Diablo's land and has some lithic material. No illegal excavations there show how thick the lens is, but surface lithics are pretty heavy. But as I recall, the edge of the looter pit, a mere five feet away from our excavation unit, showed a pretty thin lens in this corner of the site.
The 1x2m excavation was productive for about 35 cm, and then the lens petered out. The lithics were much more randomly sorted than at the other scatter, with size ranging from big flakes and broken tools to minuscule flakes that go through the screen.
It is nice to get away from the black clay. This nice 10YR5/2 silt is a dream to screen. And to dig – the guys gave me writer's cramp trying to keep up with the bags. I was writing nonstop as the excavators would hand up a bucket full of dirt, the screeners would dump it in the screen, blowing dust everywhere, and pull out the three non-artifacts, before dumping it all in the chert bag. I have never been a part of faster excavations.
Still no bone or antler, and not much in the way of hammerstones. So I am not sure that this is a workshop (rather than a dump; see arguments below), but by 10:00 am we have finished excavating, and it seems pointless to open another unit in the same place. After profiling and backfilling, my bureaucrazy manipulations begin in earnest. I have now officially run out of backups.
Adriana, says Miguel (he is back in the field with us), will be back in the office Monday, can get the letter taken care of then. Antonia calls Gustavo, who says that the letter has to be written by Salvador, who is not in the office (he is in Petén), but he is getting Yvon to let him into S's office with her key to see if he can find the letter and get Yvon to sign it.
But Yvon is in Petén, too, at the meetings at Sayaxche with Adriana. So nobody can sign it, but Gustavo left the letter that he wrote, typed up, with Aurora, Salvador's secretary. As soon as Salvador comes in he will sign it, it will get faxed over to me, and we will be in business.
But since Salvador was in the field on Thursday and traveling, he will likely not come in until Monday.
Which leaves me Friday, Saturday and Sunday where I am looking like a hind tit on a boar hog - absolutely useless. And hemorrhaging money, as I pay the guys to wash lithics rather than dig. After two days of bringing home all the material, I had to find a different place to keep the stuff, since the garage at the lab was filling up too fast for Antonia's comfort. We started storing it in a small shed in at a friend's house in San José. We did get the sixteen gunny sacks of material washed in eight hours, after which I turn the guys loose for the weekend. We hope to start work again on Monday.
So the politicking begins again. Salvador is supposed to come in to the office, and he will sign the letter (supposing it even exists).
On the way home, while fixing a blowout, I receive a call from Antonia. The fax did come. It names Adriana only as the investigator of the project (fine) and says that there are repercussions for refusal. Don Angel has to give us permission to dig, or he risks a denuncio, which could lead to his land being seized by the government.
I leave a message for Adriana (who is still ducking my calls) and tell her that she needs to pick up the fax so that we can take it with us when we (she and I) go to the owner's house on Monday to present him with the letter.
Thirty minutes later (the jack I borrowed from a passing motorist does not lift the car, and I am waiting for help from the lab) I get a call from Miguelito, who is going with me to the field, instead of Adriana.
"But it is not your name on the letter. It is hers. She needs to go." I am firm on this point. But he is the messenger, and not the source of the news. I call Adriana back, and leave a less coherent message about the need for the project directora to be at the site when the fight begins.
Fifteen minutes later she calls me back. She has decided that since her name is on the letter, it would be better if she were to go with me to talk to the landowner, just to avoid any unpleasantness (what a brilliant idea – why didn't I think of that?). The problem is, she has an 8:30 meeting back at the office.
No problem, I counter. We leave at 6:00 am, drive out there, talk to the landowner, and drive back; she can be back in more than enough time to get breakfast and still make her meeting.
I hear the flinch on the other side of the line. But she concedes the point. I just need to pick her up at 6, and then Miguelito can stay with me for the rest of the day, as the IDAEH representative.
So now I can prepare for fieldwork with the actual hope of getting the last couple of days of my work done. A minor miracle. And one in which I still have little faith.
Never again will I accept cold congealed egg-and-nondescript veggie lunches when I can have the daily special brought to me hot and fresh and delicious.
Another wonderful aspect to the week's work was Mario. Without any additional guidance, he has followed the procedure for analyzing the lithics, and has already completed a gunnysack full from the material we dug up this week. He comes in, works hard, and even asked if he can use this material as the basis for an undergraduate thesis.
Which means we work on the material together, we write it up together, and we publish it together. He benefits, I benefit, and the stuff gets published. And possibly most importantly, I get someone who likes lithics to bounce ideas off of. We talk about how the stuff was made, we talk about what we expect to be different, and he provides me with a foil for some of my arguments.
The beauty of nature on the way to and from the site has also provided a nice boost at the beginning and end of the day. I leave before the sun rises, and get back after the sun sets, so I actually see the sunrise and sunset on the lake every day. It is beautiful, and I almost succeeded in getting the perfect photo of net fishers in the lake with a glorious sunset in the background (see photos of sunrise, sunset, and fishing).
Now if I can just get rid of Hugo so easily.
*Addendum for the archaeologists. The first unit we dug, in the black clay, was almost certainly the result of secondary deposition of artifacts. Even as dense as the midden was, and as heavy as the concentrations of small flakes was, the fact remains that the lithics were dumped there after a cleanup of the workshop. There were small patches of very large flakes. There were small concentrations of small flakes. There was a small lens of ceramic material, dumped in a lens to one side. There was no size sorting, and no layering. It was as though the cleanup of the workshop (probably just up the hill on another person's land) was done by the basketload. First you clear the largest flakes, dumping them into the basket. Next you scoop up the small to medium flakes, and dump them. Finally you sweep, getting all the small ones. Broken pottery also gets dumped. And where would you dump such nasty stuff? Where is nobody walking?
The clayey bog just downslope.
The other deposition event we have excavated so far – the far side of the mound from Don Diablo's land – is likely primary deposition. I will not be sure of that until I see the soil samples, but it seems more likely, given the size sorting and mixing. It also seems unlikely that workshop debris would be dumped at the apex of a natural hill. More likely this was the location of knapping. Only the presence of the now-destroyed building makes me doubt. Sure would be nice to dig on the other side, where the lens is thick…
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