End of the field season

13 August 2005

I can’t believe it is over.  I am sitting in the Guatemala City airport, waiting on my wife’s plane to arrive, and I simply cannot believe the field season is over.  I keep looking around to see if someone is going to jump out at me from behind a post, tie me up, throw me on a plane back to the Petén, and make me go back to work.

It is not all over, of course.  The easy part is now complete – the fieldwork.  Now I have to switch modes and get busy with the analysis.

For that matter, the fieldwork is not complete, either.  Let me back up.

The luck I was having only lasted through the border trip.  On the way back through, we decided to ask permission to dig at the lithic site I have been calling “Tok’il” – the chert place.  Rumor had it that Papatulo had had a visit from the owner's dad.  Papatulo’s house was locked when we went by, but the five-year-old grandson Detlep peeked out of the door, and opened it once he saw it was me. 

“Do you know where Papatulo is?”

“He went walking to San Andres.”

“Where could we find him?”

“At the house of his daughter-in-law.  Or if not there, at the cantina.”

San Andres has no dearth of cantinas.  And since Papatulo doesn’t drink….  “Which cantina?”  The best answer I could get from Detlep was that it was “the cantina with those things that are up and down.”

Great.  We eventually find Papatulo at the soccer game, and he goes with us to the house of Don Angel (yet another one).  He warned us that Don Angel was pretty upset when he showed up at Papatulo’s house, so we were surprised that the codger was no more of a problem than he was.  After a half hour of talking, he said we had to talk to his son.

We dropped off all the stuff at the camp and headed back to San Benito.  We got there, and Don Angel introduced us to his son, Miguel Angel.  We walked through the situation again.  We are archaeologists.  We understand he has a small (really small – about 60 foot x 60 foot) piece of property, and there are some interesting features we would like to explore.  We are not interested in causing him problems with the government – it is his property, and he can build or mine rocks or whatever from his land.  We only want to do a small excavation that will take two or three days, and we will be gone.  We only want information.  Once I saw him glance back at a very angry-looking woman behind him, and she shook her head once, very firmly.

After we presented everything, I said, “And we would like your permission to excavate.  It would be a great help to us.”

He took a deep breath, and stared at the ground in front of our feet.  Seconds ticked by.  Then minutes.  We waited.  After he had enough, he looked at Dad.  “What do you think?”

Don Angel launched into another salvo of how he couldn’t make the decision, his son was independent, ad nauseum.  And eventually lapsed into silence.  We sat again, watching him stare at the ground in front of us.  Five more minutes of silence. 

After it was all over, we decided to give him more space to discuss it.  We went around the corner, and talked it over with Papatulo.  The way we were reading it, the guy 1) wanted money for the permission, 2) was afraid that the government would take away his property, 3) was worried about getting accused of looting (there is a huge looter’s pit in the center of the plot) and 4) was mistrustful of a couple of strangers.

Papatulo explained that he also was likely worried that if he gave permission, he wouldn’t get to keep whatever we found.  People here believe (this is confirmed by our workers) that we have these machines that tell us where the good stuff is underground, and that is how we decide where to dig. 

We finally round the corner and walk back up, to hear, “and if they aren’t going to give you money, there is no reason for you to do it.”  Dad speaking.

Fierce woman glances in our direction, and tries to shush him, but he can’t hear her “¡SSST!”.  We give them a minute more, listening all the while to a rant about how we should pay for the right to dig.  Then when they turn back to us, Miguel Angel said, I think it would be best if you didn’t dig.  We tried a couple of rear-guard actions to convince him, but ended up simply thanking him for his time.  And gave the two-faced old man a ride home.  At the end of the ride, he turned to me and said “My son will be coming over tomorrow to look at his property.  I’ll try and talk to him.”

Yep.  Please do, you two-faced jerk.

So no permission, and the best we could do was to tell him, real friendly-like, that we would be coming back with the head inspector of archaeology for Guatemala, who would “explain what we wanted to do better than we can.”  Which means that he will explain the law to Miguel Angel, and maybe even cause some trouble for him for allowing his land to be looted.  So much for not wanting to cause trouble.  Gustavo, the inspector, has been reluctant to visit us this season (I think he doesn’t like coming out) and has been putting us off.  He is required to visit twice (at our expense) and he has not even made an effort to come once.  But he will likely show up within the next couple of weeks.  He has assured me, however, that I can write a letter requesting an extension of the field season and get back for a couple of days more fieldwork, even after the artifacts are moved.

So instead of working on my research on Monday, I went back to Trinidad and helped close up the season there.  With Ingrid gone, my help pretty much involved supervising a couple of small tests and running the backfilling crew, which involved enough foot-dragging to make two days of work out of it, rather than just one.  There was a lot of stuff to be backfilled, but it should not have required a crew of ten two days to complete the task. 

While I was supervising the last of the excavations, word came back to me, in the form of gossip, that Bilo had decided not to work.  The moment I turned my back, he sat down.  I asked around, and found out that it was true.

Now Bilo and I had been having problems of this nature all season.  Pleading, being nice, getting angry, yelling, threatening, none had any effect on the guy.  He was hired because he was the son of one of our local contacts.  He knew this, and figured he could get away with anything, including this kind of insolence.  

There is also something not wired right in the kid.  He did not marry the girl, but refuses to admit that he lied about it.  He still holds to the story, even though the girl was asked directly and she said “¡We are not even novios!”  Her father went on a rampage when the story that Bilo was telling got back to him, and he confronted Bilo’s dad about it, wanting to call Bilo out in the street to answer for what was being said.  There is also a strong rumor that the girl was pretty severely beaten for her (non-existent) role in the lie.  Bilo, unaffected by the vortex of lies and violence around him, holds to his story, even offering to ask his “wife” if she would come to the camp and make tortillas for the despedida last week.

But the insolence and the laziness finally got to me.  I fired him.  I did it in front of the guys, which was probably my worst move.  When he did not leave, I took the unused shovel gently from his hands, and said “No more, Bilo.  Go home.”

It has been the source of stress for me ever since.  First stressor is the relationship between us and the family.  They are our connection to Nueva San José.  Next was the relationships among our workers.  One of the guys came to me during work and asked me to talk to one of the brothers, who came by with some veiled threats for “the whistleblower”.  “If you would talk to him before you leave,” he said, “it would be a big help.  You leave, and the problem remains behind you.  And I have to live here.”

I talked to the brother, and we smoothed things out.  But it has created awful tension all week.  We worked through Thursday in the field, however, mapping in excavation units and backfilling excavations in the harbor.  I completed a neat mapping trick shot, reminiscent of old games of horse we played in the back yard: off the water, through the corn field, past the trees, under the overhang, nothing but net.  It took 45 minutes to set up the shot (including a couple of dumb moves where we sent the guy holding the rod away too soon, only to have to call to have him sent back), but it ended up saving about three hours of multiple shots, as well as a fair amount of combined introduced error.  The high fives that resulted rivaled anything I ever saw at college basketball games.

The only odd thing about that day was the fact that Don Kike, who has quickly become one of my favorite guys in the field, asked permission not to go to the harbor.  When pressed, he claimed that his uncle, who is the guardian there (so that’s how you ended up here!) does not like that Kike is working with us.  Furthermore, recent gossip let him know that Soto will cause problems for him the moment he steps onto the property. 

At least I can be reassured that stressful problems and gossip are part of all aspects of life in the Petén, and that it does not all get laid at my feet.

The last day of mapping was completely anticlimactic.  We set up, ran a number of shots in the field, and changed station on top of the ballcourt.  Then, verifying our location by shooting back to the previous station, the computer failed.  For the next three hours, we repeated the same twenty steps we thought of the moment it failed.  And nobody was content to believe that the others knew anything about it, so each new person to touch the machine ran through the same steps, figuring it was sheer incompetence that was keeping progress at bay.

One definition of insanity I have read runs something like this: “A mental condition characterized by the repeating of identical input while holding the expectation of different results.”

Finally, Matt broke through the insane cycle and called the help line (I love the fact that we can call on a cell phone from the Petén!), and actually managed to get a guy on the line that knew the machine.  A bad connection, he said.  Check all the connections, and I have to step out of the office for an hour, and I will call you back.

In Guatemala?

Yes.

Five minutes later, all the connections were checked and rechecked, and we ran through the twenty-step diagnostics again.

Same result.  And now, a fifty-five minute wait while Ned gets back from his walkabout. 

At the end of the wait, we decided against waiting further.  The details that remained were relatively trivial – more of a backup than anything else, and we called the field season done.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Since then, it has been a pretty heavy-duty packing frenzy.  Three trips to Sta. Elena to get loads of boxes (see attached photo) and a lot of attempted organizing of a huge amount of pottery, stone tools and debitage, obsidian, some jade, a few droplets of blood, rivulets of sweat, and, yes, a few tears.  It was not completed when I came into Flores last night; Matt will be finishing it up in the next few days, and will be transporting it to Sta. Elena, where he is setting up for his laboratory analysis.  I will make arrangements to transport the lithics back to Antigua when my wife is gone, but in the meantime, I am just going to try to push back the insanity for a while. 

Elly, meanwhile, is starting her own project, now that she is finished helping with ours.  She is putting in a couple of test units at a site called Chachaklu’um, located about six kms to the east of Motul, the regional capital.  She will be looking for funding for next year, and her stuff will be exciting.  But even she had a hard time getting psyched to go to the field after the long, hard season we had.  Fortunately, it will only last a couple of days.

On a final note, dinner Thursday night was for Maria Magdelena’s birthday (her husband is the guard at the camp; she was hired to wash our clothes, and is single-handedly responsible for a severe outbreak of chafing on the project).  We bought the cake, and she stayed in the house all day preparing a dinner for the men.  Now that is a real birthday present: Hey, dear, I thought for your birthday this year I’d invite all the men folk over and you can wait on them hand and foot.  How does that sound?

I dealt my own sneaky hand in there, sure to be placed under the category of “the gringo doesn’t know any better”.  I served the cake.  And not only did I serve (men don’t do that sort of thing) but I served the kids first (they had asked for the cake to be served before they had to go to bed, and had even sung to me: “We want cake, we want cake, we want cake now”), making sure everyone got a nice slice.  But the colmo was that I also served the women, and I served them before the men.

I actually heard some snide remarks.  “Well, maybe we should start singing so we can get a slice before the cake is all gone,” one of the men said, almost sotto voce.

I said nothing.  I just kept serving.  But it made me smile inside.

I continue smiling now.  My wife is minutes away from appearing, and we have twelve whole days of respite from the field.  I simply cannot wait.