Monday, 6 February 2006
Some weeks I have to work at remembering enough things to report. And then there are days that require an entry all to themselves. This weekend was such a time.
I went to Colha, a Maya site in Belize that specialized in chert tool production. The chert from the area is of very high quality, and artisans at the site turned the raw material into beautiful tools to be traded; countless sites across the Maya area have offerings made of Colha bifaces. But the pretty trade wares were not the only thing they produced at Colha - they also made utilitarian tools, like axes and hoes.
Unlike most of the sites that tourists go to see, Colha is not a big site. There is a central area with large mounds, and even a ballcourt, but most of the mounds at Colha are small workshops, with tons of debitage representing centuries of work.
For a lithics guy like me, this is Mecca. One of the most respected members of the profession, Don Crabtree, once said of Colha that it was the most important lithic site in the world. After seeing it, I believe him.
To get there, you take the Old Northern Highway through Belize. Lest you get any kind of mistaken impression about what constitutes a highway, let me make clear: this is no highway by any normal definition of the term. Furthermore, since Colha is not a typical tourist destination, it isn't even on any of the maps. But in the insurance office at the Belizean border, I came across a copy of the National Geographic Maya map, and it showed both the road and the site. And I was off.
The Old Northern Road (so called by the people who live there – they don't even think of it as a highway) is a 1-1/2 lane road that has fallen into disrepair. Potholes the entire length of it, it resembles a dirt road more than a highway. There is pavement, but most of it is simply broken and pitted.
And on the side of one segment of the Old Northern Highway is a recently dug three-foot deep ditch. And the rocks that were taken out of the ditch were all chert. And these things were huge. Boulders of beautiful, chocolate brown chert (the one in the attached photo to the right is about 65 pounds). I hopped the ditch and grabbed a 35-kilo boulder and looked around for a way to get it to the car. I finally flung the stone across the ditch, then jumped after it. And then bandaged my hand, where razor-fine edges had just lacerated my palms.
But I now am the proud owner of a huge chert boulder from the northern Belize chert-bearing zone (and it works beautifully, Thad… eat your heart out).
I finally got to the site, and it is a cattle ranch. On the gate is a sign that says "Trespassers will be Persecuted". Not being keen on being persecuted, I waved. One of the girls came over, heard me out, and walked back to her older brother. He came over, listened, and started to walk away. I was still not certain whether I was being allowed in.
I am used to having to explain myself several times. Whenever you are working in a language that is not your first, there will be enough errors to cause confusion from time to time. But this is Belize, and the official language is English. The patois that is spoken by these guys, though, was much closer to the Gullah that I heard as a child on the Sea Islands of South Carolina than any other English I have come across. So I thought I had been invited in, but wasn't sure.
Finally I was led to the house, where I put in my respectful request to mom. She turned to the kids and told them to take me out back. I continued introducing myself to my entourage, and was given their names, which, when I parroted them back, would elicit a giggle and a correction from mom. ShuGAHre, for example, was quickly corrected to Sugar Ray (see photo of kid in yellow rubber boots).
We started back through the cattle pasture. And the mounds were just too much to be described. I took more pictures of my foot than I care to count (the boot in the foreground will give you some sense of scale of the lithic debitage…).
Meanwhile, the kids were foraging. They grabbed plums off the trees, threw a rock and maimed a bird (in the photo of Sugar Ray he is holding the bird) and killed a tortoise for the pot. And I followed their wanderings across kilometers of low mounds. And every one was littered with lithic garbage. Broken tools by the hundreds. Flakes, hammerstones, failed tools. It was all there. Beautiful workmanship and delicate finished products resulted from these workshops. Broken examples of tools that would have ended up as offerings across the Maya area were casually discarded on the ground, because they broke as the finishing touches were being put on them.
There were also numerous examples of a specific class of artifacts that I had read about before but never seen. Originally called orange-peel flakes, they were the final stage in preparing the bits of large biface tools. The "tranchet" flake was struck off of the end of the tool to provide a sharp edge for the bit, and it was the last thing that was done to the tool before it left the workshop – thus each flake represents one tool. So you can quickly do a count of how many tools left the workshop by counting the number of tranchet flakes left behind.
I had read about them, had seen illustrations and descriptions, but had not seen the actual artifacts. They are much bigger than I had expected, and the resulting axe was a pretty hefty item.
The variety of tools also surprised me, along with the differences between and among the mounds. Some had huge numbers of large flakes, others were covered with smaller flakes. But the debris was simply everywhere.
The fantastic news for me is that La Estrella would fit right in. If you transported the mounds I am looking at in Petén, and placed it in the middle of Colha, you might wonder at the lack of high quality material, but you would not notice anything out of the ordinary about this mound, compared to the ones at there.
The main difference, other than material, is the sheer overwhelming number of mounds at Colha. Instead of having three or four mounds like I have at La Estrella, there are well over a hundred.
I think that the thing that surprised me most about Colha was the larger architecture. Everyone writing about Colha downplays the large masonry architecture at the site. And compared to most Maya regional centers, it is pretty small. But they have large residential compounds in several places across the site and a civic-ceremonial center that includes a 6-m mound and a ballcourt (both of which are covered in the forest that is carefully cut back everywhere else at the site) . But the focus of research has always been the small mounds made up of 3-foot deep stacks of chert debitage.
The kids loved helping. They would pick up a tool and show me, and get me to take a picture. They also got a kick out of taking pictures of me (and of the horses, and of each other, and of the grass, and….) with my camera. Surprisingly enough, the pictures mostly came out. Which was pretty cool.
It was a good trip. I made friends with the six hitchhikers I picked up. I made friends with the kids who showed me around the site. I collected chert from a few different places in the chert bearing zone. I ate some delicious jerk chicken at a roadside stand that makes Palmer's seem like sawdust (and those of you who have eaten your way across Jazz Fest know what I am talking about…) . I got pictures of wonderful Belizean architecture (photo b4), which is very different from Petén architecture, and I bought a walking stick from the family of a hitchhiking kid I picked up (photo b5). I ate Belizean food, drank Belizean brandy, and just had the best busman's holiday ever.
Some weeks I have to work at remembering enough things to report. And then there are days that require an entry all to themselves. This weekend was such a time.
I went to Colha, a Maya site in Belize that specialized in chert tool production. The chert from the area is of very high quality, and artisans at the site turned the raw material into beautiful tools to be traded; countless sites across the Maya area have offerings made of Colha bifaces. But the pretty trade wares were not the only thing they produced at Colha - they also made utilitarian tools, like axes and hoes.
Unlike most of the sites that tourists go to see, Colha is not a big site. There is a central area with large mounds, and even a ballcourt, but most of the mounds at Colha are small workshops, with tons of debitage representing centuries of work.
For a lithics guy like me, this is Mecca. One of the most respected members of the profession, Don Crabtree, once said of Colha that it was the most important lithic site in the world. After seeing it, I believe him.
To get there, you take the Old Northern Highway through Belize. Lest you get any kind of mistaken impression about what constitutes a highway, let me make clear: this is no highway by any normal definition of the term. Furthermore, since Colha is not a typical tourist destination, it isn't even on any of the maps. But in the insurance office at the Belizean border, I came across a copy of the National Geographic Maya map, and it showed both the road and the site. And I was off.
The Old Northern Road (so called by the people who live there – they don't even think of it as a highway) is a 1-1/2 lane road that has fallen into disrepair. Potholes the entire length of it, it resembles a dirt road more than a highway. There is pavement, but most of it is simply broken and pitted.
And on the side of one segment of the Old Northern Highway is a recently dug three-foot deep ditch. And the rocks that were taken out of the ditch were all chert. And these things were huge. Boulders of beautiful, chocolate brown chert (the one in the attached photo to the right is about 65 pounds). I hopped the ditch and grabbed a 35-kilo boulder and looked around for a way to get it to the car. I finally flung the stone across the ditch, then jumped after it. And then bandaged my hand, where razor-fine edges had just lacerated my palms.I finally got to the site, and it is a cattle ranch. On the gate is a sign that says "Trespassers will be Persecuted". Not being keen on being persecuted, I waved. One of the girls came over, heard me out, and walked back to her older brother. He came over, listened, and started to walk away. I was still not certain whether I was being allowed in.
I am used to having to explain myself several times. Whenever you are working in a language that is not your first, there will be enough errors to cause confusion from time to time. But this is Belize, and the official language is English. The patois that is spoken by these guys, though, was much closer to the Gullah that I heard as a child on the Sea Islands of South Carolina than any other English I have come across. So I thought I had been invited in, but wasn't sure.
Finally I was led to the house, where I put in my respectful request to mom. She turned to the kids and told them to take me out back. I continued introducing myself to my entourage, and was given their names, which, when I parroted them back, would elicit a giggle and a correction from mom. ShuGAHre, for example, was quickly corrected to Sugar Ray (see photo of kid in yellow rubber boots).
We started back through the cattle pasture. And the mounds were just too much to be described. I took more pictures of my foot than I care to count (the boot in the foreground will give you some sense of scale of the lithic debitage…).Meanwhile, the kids were foraging. They grabbed plums off the trees, threw a rock and maimed a bird (in the photo of Sugar Ray he is holding the bird) and killed a tortoise for the pot. And I followed their wanderings across kilometers of low mounds. And every one was littered with lithic garbage. Broken tools by the hundreds. Flakes, hammerstones, failed tools. It was all there. Beautiful workmanship and delicate finished products resulted from these workshops. Broken examples of tools that would have ended up as offerings across the Maya area were casually discarded on the ground, because they broke as the finishing touches were being put on them.
There were also numerous examples of a specific class of artifacts that I had read about before but never seen. Originally called orange-peel flakes, they were the final stage in preparing the bits of large biface tools. The "tranchet" flake was struck off of the end of the tool to provide a sharp edge for the bit, and it was the last thing that was done to the tool before it left the workshop – thus each flake represents one tool. So you can quickly do a count of how many tools left the workshop by counting the number of tranchet flakes left behind.
I had read about them, had seen illustrations and descriptions, but had not seen the actual artifacts. They are much bigger than I had expected, and the resulting axe was a pretty hefty item.The variety of tools also surprised me, along with the differences between and among the mounds. Some had huge numbers of large flakes, others were covered with smaller flakes. But the debris was simply everywhere.
The fantastic news for me is that La Estrella would fit right in. If you transported the mounds I am looking at in Petén, and placed it in the middle of Colha, you might wonder at the lack of high quality material, but you would not notice anything out of the ordinary about this mound, compared to the ones at there.
The main difference, other than material, is the sheer overwhelming number of mounds at Colha. Instead of having three or four mounds like I have at La Estrella, there are well over a hundred.
I think that the thing that surprised me most about Colha was the larger architecture. Everyone writing about Colha downplays the large masonry architecture at the site. And compared to most Maya regional centers, it is pretty small. But they have large residential compounds in several places across the site and a civic-ceremonial center that includes a 6-m mound and a ballcourt (both of which are covered in the forest that is carefully cut back everywhere else at the site) . But the focus of research has always been the small mounds made up of 3-foot deep stacks of chert debitage.
The kids loved helping. They would pick up a tool and show me, and get me to take a picture. They also got a kick out of taking pictures of me (and of the horses, and of each other, and of the grass, and….) with my camera. Surprisingly enough, the pictures mostly came out. Which was pretty cool.
It was a good trip. I made friends with the six hitchhikers I picked up. I made friends with the kids who showed me around the site. I collected chert from a few different places in the chert bearing zone. I ate some delicious jerk chicken at a roadside stand that makes Palmer's seem like sawdust (and those of you who have eaten your way across Jazz Fest know what I am talking about…) . I got pictures of wonderful Belizean architecture (photo b4), which is very different from Petén architecture, and I bought a walking stick from the family of a hitchhiking kid I picked up (photo b5). I ate Belizean food, drank Belizean brandy, and just had the best busman's holiday ever.
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