Hand gestures and the Itza'

2 July 2005

This is the journal from last week.  I almost had it completed when we left Flores last Sunday, but I couldn’t finish it in time.  Enjoy…

Don Arturo extended his hand as if to shake hands.  “The deer was this big,” he said, indicating the height of the animal with the blade of the hand.  Ten minutes later, we were talking about his corn field.  “Three weeks ago, the corn was this high,” hand extended palm-up indicating a height below his knee, “and now it is this high,” raising his hand to waist height, still extending the hand palm up.

It got me to asking some questions.  We gringos have a pretty uninteresting way of indicating size.  What size is your kid?  Extend out hand as if patting the kid on the head.  The dog that chased me must have been this big.  Extend hand out the same way.  How big is the corn plant?  This high, indicated with the same gesture.

My guys were incredulous when I explained that we don’t use different gestures for animals, people, corn and chickens (yep, poultry gets its own size indicator – hand held much like a cupped baseball with fingers pointed downward).  How rude it is, they think, to render such different things equal with a wave of the hand. 

I asked a few others about it, and I did get one more interesting tidbit.  Fish, which we measure between the hands spread equal distance in front of us, are measured from the back of the left hand (held closer to the body) to the right hand, extended farther in front in a diagonal.  Cool to hear and see a difference like that.

A corollary to that occurred to me.  In the Yucatec Maya language (very closely related to Itzá Maya), there is a thing called a numeral classifier – a way of indicating what kind of thing you are counting, be it people or animals or inanimate things or long, thin things.  Each has its own type of classifier.  So you don’t just count one pancake, two pancakes, three pancakes; you say one flat-thing pancake, two flat-thing pancakes, three flat-thing pancakes. 

It would be an interesting thing to compare gestures with the numeral classifiers.  Maybe I’ll talk it out with Papatulo, when he comes back to work for me.

Yes, O Best Beloved, my excavation mentor, Don Arturo, has been absconded with by the project co-director for her ethnoarchaeological research.  He is the obvious choice – he knows and is respected by all, and his knowledge of local Itzá ethnography is astonishing (I will be using him for my canoe research).  But it has been tough going from the three dons to two dons (one of which is none too bright) and a couple of kids.

Our ongoing dispute with the land-renter began again.  DJ was waiting for us at the site, and accused us of cutting another cow’s tail.  Poppycock, of course.  The workers are under constant supervision, and no one can even be gone for 10 seconds without being noticed by everyone.  Matt got up in arms, and I lost it.  I told him (bad cop-esque) that we would just go talk to the alcalde, and that talking to him directly was a waste of time.  Matt shushed me (I hate being shushed, even when playing bad cop) and told DJ that we were not responsible, but we would remind the workers that they should respect the cattle. 

All of us, separately, had similar encounters with our workers afterwards.  Elly went to her excavations, and the guys told her, “We know where the tail is!  It is in Elly’s bag!”  Matt told his guys to respect the animals, and it immediately became the joke.  I whirled on Tirso when we got to the site, got right in his face, and said “It is imperative that you respect the animals.  Do you understand?”  Pause.  Pause.  Then my goofy grin.

After he got over the shock of such a strong confrontation with me, he (and the rest of the guys) had a good laugh.

The dumbest part is, DJ then turned his attention to the excavation of a couple of water holes on the site.  With a bulldozer.  He is, apparently, trying like hell to get thrown off the site.  The law is very clear – you get rights to the very surface of the land, and not what is underneath.  That part belongs to the country.  To dig, especially in an archaeological site (as we well know) you have to request an endless supply of permits to undertake the work.  We presented him with the paper from IDAEH giving us permission to work at Trinidad, but he would not accept it.  We warned him to be careful, that if he bulldozed mounds, there would be trouble.  He got belligerent and would not let us talk, talking over us until we gave up. 

At the end of the week, we had a visit from the local head of archaeological monuments.  He had heard through one of our guys that DJ was destroying the site, and came out at the end of the day to investigate.  We walked over to one area of destruction, where the bulldozed area had clipped the edge of a platform built on a leveled hill.  There was some material on the surface, but not much.  He managed the impossible – turning over dirt in the site without doing much damage.  He is either really lucky or dumb like a fox.   I prefer to think of him as just lucky, but I have to hold out the possibility that he is not as dumb as he seems.

The excavations are going better.  At the beginning of the week, I was feeling a little jealous.  The rest of the 20-person crew was over the crest of the site excavating cool loot from trash dumps next to the ballcourt. 

Now if you are looking for cool loot, a nice structure with known ritual function would be a good place to look.  The garbage thrown out there is simply amazing.  Beautiful painted plates with glyphs.  Carved glyphs on vessels.  Huge quantities of gorgeous pottery.  Figurines.  And the few pieces of stone tool that appear in the mixture are stunning bifaces of material that we don’t see elsewhere at the site (good for my diss). 

After seeing all the material coming through that part of the project, I was just a little discouraged to be excavating a small household group with very few artifacts.  The few pieces we have from the fill are small and pretty eroded.  Worse still, the walls of the structure were insignificant, and so the collapse of the structure did not protect much material. Apparently there were two places on the site you could dig without hitting artifacts.  It just so happened that the second one was a prehistoric structure.


Basically, I have a basal platform faced with a single row of nicely cut stone.  Decent investment in the façade to impress the Peches, but no investment in the rest of the house.

Now, let me set the record straight.  I am an archaeologist.  I am interested in understanding previous ways of living.  I even consider myself an economic archaeologist – I am interested in the way that people made groceries and what they did for a living.  My focus is never going to be the royal tombs, filled with jade and gold and elite goods; the stuff I look for is more often left in the garbage.

Even so, it can still be hard at the end of the day to see my colleagues coming in from the field too loaded down to fit in the truck for all the goodies they found during the day.  Even when I will be analyzing that material for my dissertation, as well as the two sad bags of material I add to the pile.

On Thursday, that changed a little by the end of the day.  After finishing my clearing excavations on the first structure, I opened two units, one in the middle of the structure I had just cleared to get more information from earlier phases of construction, the other in the next building in the residential group.  The small unit in the structure kept going down without hitting anything – no floor or anything.  This surprised me – I had seven floors in the plaza, and no corresponding construction levels show up in the construction of the building?  How can that happen? 

The other unit started coming up with a fair amount of obsidian, right at the end of the day.  We have been getting one or two pieces of obsidian at a time.  We pulled ten pieces out of the screen at the end of the level, and it didn’t get any less at the beginning of the day Friday.  There is a lot of obsidian in that unit, and it is coming from all over the unit.  I thought it might be an offering or something, but it is simply a lot of obsidian. 

The stuff from the underwater archaeologists was cool, but it was real archaeology instead of the treasure hunt we had hopes of.  They came back with some very interesting information, based on the maps they made and the material they collected.  The conditions were nearly perfect for doing the work, according to Mel – clear water and ambient light that extends pretty deep.  And the water extends pretty deep, too.  They did a 100-foot dive at the end of the week and did not come anywhere near the bottom. 


But what we did not get was lots of loot, right off the shore.  They came back with some really cool stuff – large potsherds and lithics, collected from a range of depths.  But there was no offerings or canoes that they identified, and the piers for the dock that we had hoped for did not appear, either. 

Their first day was pretty typical.  Their plane arrived on time, and we grabbed a bite to eat before heading over to pick up the air tanks.  The air tanks, predictably, were a problem.

Bus driver:  I cannot let you unload cargo until the paperwork is signed at the office.

Matt: But you arrived an hour late and the office is now closed.

Bus driver:  I can’t help you.  You have to get the form signed.

Matt:  How many people are going to be asking for the air tanks off of your bus!? 

But nothing could be done.  He was not going to unload the air tanks, no matter what.  And he was leaving with the air tanks on the bus in an hour, so we had to get his form signed.  So we went off to the office, located in the heart of the market, a pretty sketchy area to be in at night.  The manager finally answered the door, and said that it would be perfectly all right to take the tanks, but….

Turns out that the air tanks weren’t even on that bus.  They were on the next bus, set to arrive at 10:30 pm.

So I took Mel and Thad, who had had a really long day of travel, back to the camp, and Matt stayed with our workers and their truck to wait on the bus.  And when the tanks came, the bus driver was glad to get them off his bus, because they had been rolling around a little too much to make him happy.  Now let’s see, pressurized oxygen (highly flammable), driven across bumpy roads for 500 miles.  Don’t you think it would be normal to secure them pretty well?

Nahhhh….

Mel and Thad also lost the next day of diving because of some broken equipment.  They arrived on Monday, lost Tuesday, were headed back Sunday, and couldn’t dive on Saturday because of the dangers of flying after a dive.

But they made the most of the three days, and collected some cool stuff, mapped a broad area, and noted some really interesting features. There is a wall (almost certainly natural) pretty deep down that parallels the shore.  There is a thick layer of silt near the shore that would be a nice place to preserve archaeological materials.  And there was enough material around to arouse interest.  As far as pilot projects go, it was an unqualified success.