25 Feb 2006
Who would have thought that working Christmas breaks at Dixie Lumber would provide perfect training for archaeological analysis?
Until I went to Tulane, every Christmas vacation was spent helping take inventory and enter inventory data into the computers at my dad's store. Some years it fell on my birthday, other times on my dad's, but inventory was always an end-of-the-year thing. The theory of it is pretty simple – count everything at the store; if we sell it, it must be counted.
In practice, that is a lot of 3/8" pan-head machine screws and self drilling anchor bolts and a lot of linear feet of ¾" cove mold. I remember spending hours counting out individual screws and bolts and nuts, sliding each one off the counter into the plastic bin in my lap. 674, 675, 676, 677, 678… Every once in a while, I would get asked a question or get otherwise distracted. And have to start all over again.
This week, using the same techniques I perfected at Dixie Lumber over the course of a decade, I am counting pieces of stone debitage. And today I finished the debitage analysis for Trinidad. The total number of flakes, cores, tools, shatter, and burnt stone recovered from the site totals 37,262. With Mario's help (and a very little from Noemi), I have now finished up that part of the analysis. There are still a few small bags here and there – lithics that ended up in the ceramics/faunal/figurines bag by accident – but I am basically finished. It is a good feeling.
I still have a few boxes of material from other sites (Chakokot, Motul, and Buenavista), but they will be taken care of in the next week or so. And that leaves the material from La Estrella, which I have let Mario work on while I have been in the field. Last weekend, he and I worked like mad to finish three costales full of lithic debitage, just to see what time would be necessary to analyze all 32 sacks. Even without finishing the lot (there is another costal pending), we have analyzed 29,103 pieces of debitage.
I never had to count that high on the lumber yard. And I am leaving a lot of that for later.
Field update: I did take Adriana into the field on Monday to explain to Don Diablo that I both had governmental permission and a letter from the Legal Department of IDAEH (complete with the section of the code that pertains to salvage archaeological projects on private land). Shockingly enough, he stuck to his guns, so to speak. Or, rather, his wife stuck to his guns. He was hidden away in the back room, making her do his dirty work for him.
Adriana started out by saying that it was probably better if I not go. For all the good it did, I could have gone and stuck out my tongue the whole time. She talked to the wife, then to a very belligerent son (but not the son who is the owner), and the response was the same. I don't care what is on that piece of paper – you are not getting on my land.
Again, I understand the sentiment, but the results are pretty disastrous. And are going to get worse, since the next step is to formally denounce him, and then to have his land taken away.
That ought to engender good feeling towards the archaeologists working in the area…
So we were sent packing. In the final analysis, the result is that the whole shebang has to go to the Ministerio Publico; they will send out officials with guns to explain Don Diablo´s rights to him, and then will accompany me to the field, locked and loaded in case he should come by, looking for a fight. I have never excavated while being guarded by armed soldiers - might be fun. On the other hand, Ministerio Publico has a reputation for taking years to get their act together. And I have less than two weeks. Either way, I have a huge data set, and it either expands or stays the same. Either way, I have enough to keep me busy for quite a while.
And the delay sent me back to the lab, where I kept working on the material both from La Estrella and at Trinidad.
At mid-week, we got an exciting opportunity to go to see the Tikal warehouse where all of the type collections are kept from the early excavations there. We drove up on Thursday to study the collections – Jeanette to look at the very early material from the site, Matt and Antonia to look at the Late Classic ceramics, and me to look at the lithics.
The sight there was both amazing and very disturbing. The material excavated from Tikal is simply awe-inspiring. They have so many whole vessels and beautiful pieces that you could never do it justice to describe it. Shelves and shelves of the most exquisite pottery (see photo), carved stone monuments, carved bone and shell, and stone tools. Ornamental obsidian and chert tools chipped to look like scorpions and crescent moons (see photos). Designs scratched onto the surface of stone flakes. Long, beautiful lance points of translucent chert. I was like a kid in a candy store.
But the condition of the lab was simply deplorable. In one corner we found a termite nest that had taken over an entire shelf. Thousand-year-old wooden lintels were lyingon the floor in a pile. Burials stuffed in open boxes in the middle of aisles. Mis-labled and mis-represented artifacts everywhere. No indication where anything was, nor where it came from. It made my heart hurt to see the disrepair everywhere.
But I could only spare a little time to mourn the loss of information. Because I was photographing everything in sight. Eccentrics – the fine chert ritual tools, were collected by the score. We have none at Trinidad, so photographing them is not very helpful for my comparison. But how do you stop?
Monday, we will go to do some mapping, taking Miguelito with us, and Mario will take the day off of work to go see the site. It will be fun to show off the incredibly unimpressive site (it is really only just a bunch of piles of rocks - and we are talking about a place that is only an hour´s drive from Tikal, for crying out loud), but even more fun to see his reaction to it. He has grown up in the area, and is not likely to be impressed by big mounds. But this much chert? Different story.
And I will be headed home in about a week and a half. Only for a couple of weeks, but it will be nice to have a change of pace. The honeydew list is pretty long, but at least it is a change from the 11 hour lab days. And it will also be nice to get some different food.
Best,
Crorey
Who would have thought that working Christmas breaks at Dixie Lumber would provide perfect training for archaeological analysis?
Until I went to Tulane, every Christmas vacation was spent helping take inventory and enter inventory data into the computers at my dad's store. Some years it fell on my birthday, other times on my dad's, but inventory was always an end-of-the-year thing. The theory of it is pretty simple – count everything at the store; if we sell it, it must be counted.
In practice, that is a lot of 3/8" pan-head machine screws and self drilling anchor bolts and a lot of linear feet of ¾" cove mold. I remember spending hours counting out individual screws and bolts and nuts, sliding each one off the counter into the plastic bin in my lap. 674, 675, 676, 677, 678… Every once in a while, I would get asked a question or get otherwise distracted. And have to start all over again.
This week, using the same techniques I perfected at Dixie Lumber over the course of a decade, I am counting pieces of stone debitage. And today I finished the debitage analysis for Trinidad. The total number of flakes, cores, tools, shatter, and burnt stone recovered from the site totals 37,262. With Mario's help (and a very little from Noemi), I have now finished up that part of the analysis. There are still a few small bags here and there – lithics that ended up in the ceramics/faunal/figurines bag by accident – but I am basically finished. It is a good feeling.
I still have a few boxes of material from other sites (Chakokot, Motul, and Buenavista), but they will be taken care of in the next week or so. And that leaves the material from La Estrella, which I have let Mario work on while I have been in the field. Last weekend, he and I worked like mad to finish three costales full of lithic debitage, just to see what time would be necessary to analyze all 32 sacks. Even without finishing the lot (there is another costal pending), we have analyzed 29,103 pieces of debitage.
I never had to count that high on the lumber yard. And I am leaving a lot of that for later.
Field update: I did take Adriana into the field on Monday to explain to Don Diablo that I both had governmental permission and a letter from the Legal Department of IDAEH (complete with the section of the code that pertains to salvage archaeological projects on private land). Shockingly enough, he stuck to his guns, so to speak. Or, rather, his wife stuck to his guns. He was hidden away in the back room, making her do his dirty work for him.
Adriana started out by saying that it was probably better if I not go. For all the good it did, I could have gone and stuck out my tongue the whole time. She talked to the wife, then to a very belligerent son (but not the son who is the owner), and the response was the same. I don't care what is on that piece of paper – you are not getting on my land.
Again, I understand the sentiment, but the results are pretty disastrous. And are going to get worse, since the next step is to formally denounce him, and then to have his land taken away.
That ought to engender good feeling towards the archaeologists working in the area…
So we were sent packing. In the final analysis, the result is that the whole shebang has to go to the Ministerio Publico; they will send out officials with guns to explain Don Diablo´s rights to him, and then will accompany me to the field, locked and loaded in case he should come by, looking for a fight. I have never excavated while being guarded by armed soldiers - might be fun. On the other hand, Ministerio Publico has a reputation for taking years to get their act together. And I have less than two weeks. Either way, I have a huge data set, and it either expands or stays the same. Either way, I have enough to keep me busy for quite a while.
And the delay sent me back to the lab, where I kept working on the material both from La Estrella and at Trinidad.
At mid-week, we got an exciting opportunity to go to see the Tikal warehouse where all of the type collections are kept from the early excavations there. We drove up on Thursday to study the collections – Jeanette to look at the very early material from the site, Matt and Antonia to look at the Late Classic ceramics, and me to look at the lithics.
The sight there was both amazing and very disturbing. The material excavated from Tikal is simply awe-inspiring. They have so many whole vessels and beautiful pieces that you could never do it justice to describe it. Shelves and shelves of the most exquisite pottery (see photo), carved stone monuments, carved bone and shell, and stone tools. Ornamental obsidian and chert tools chipped to look like scorpions and crescent moons (see photos). Designs scratched onto the surface of stone flakes. Long, beautiful lance points of translucent chert. I was like a kid in a candy store.
But I could only spare a little time to mourn the loss of information. Because I was photographing everything in sight. Eccentrics – the fine chert ritual tools, were collected by the score. We have none at Trinidad, so photographing them is not very helpful for my comparison. But how do you stop?
Monday, we will go to do some mapping, taking Miguelito with us, and Mario will take the day off of work to go see the site. It will be fun to show off the incredibly unimpressive site (it is really only just a bunch of piles of rocks - and we are talking about a place that is only an hour´s drive from Tikal, for crying out loud), but even more fun to see his reaction to it. He has grown up in the area, and is not likely to be impressed by big mounds. But this much chert? Different story.
And I will be headed home in about a week and a half. Only for a couple of weeks, but it will be nice to have a change of pace. The honeydew list is pretty long, but at least it is a change from the 11 hour lab days. And it will also be nice to get some different food.
Best,
Crorey
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