19 June
One really cool bit that I failed to mention last week happened after I went to talk to Don Juan with Matt. I went back to help the guys with the machete-wielding clearing operations. We were working just above the harbor area, right next to the road, clearing a structure, when Don Ticho hollered over to me. I went over and he showed me a cut dug into the structure – what appeared to be a looter’s trench. I looked it over and they asked me whether it was an oven. Sure enough, it looked like the inside of a beehive kiln. It was domed, with the top few layers collapsed, and with a small opening on the western side.
Christina has been looking for kilns all over with her magnetometer, looking for abnormal magnetic readings below the surface. There have been precious few of them found in the Maya area, or in Mesoamerica as a whole, for that matter. So this had the potential to be really big. Nobody had a phone with any time on it, so I borrowed a bike(a
seriously malfunctioning bike) to go and tell Matt.
Matt: Oooooooh, yeah. I guess we should have mentioned that. We don’t know what it is, but we have seen it. It’s in the report, I think. Sorry.
So I got Elly to drop me and the borrowed malfunctioning bike at the site. When I got back, I figured out what it is – or at least I have a good idea. It is a sweatbath. There have been a number of them reported both in historic contexts and in archaeological contexts, and I have collected a number of articles about them when we found one in the savannah about two miles inland on the Costayuc project.
That site, Tsikul, also had a ballcourt. Just like Trinidad. It was likely associated with a nearby capital, Dzibilchaltun, much like Trinidad’s connection with Motul de San José. And it is near water – was possibly even nearer when the area had canals running along the coast. Interesting parallels.
One really cool bit that I failed to mention last week happened after I went to talk to Don Juan with Matt. I went back to help the guys with the machete-wielding clearing operations. We were working just above the harbor area, right next to the road, clearing a structure, when Don Ticho hollered over to me. I went over and he showed me a cut dug into the structure – what appeared to be a looter’s trench. I looked it over and they asked me whether it was an oven. Sure enough, it looked like the inside of a beehive kiln. It was domed, with the top few layers collapsed, and with a small opening on the western side.
Christina has been looking for kilns all over with her magnetometer, looking for abnormal magnetic readings below the surface. There have been precious few of them found in the Maya area, or in Mesoamerica as a whole, for that matter. So this had the potential to be really big. Nobody had a phone with any time on it, so I borrowed a bike
Matt: Oooooooh, yeah. I guess we should have mentioned that. We don’t know what it is, but we have seen it. It’s in the report, I think. Sorry.
So I got Elly to drop me and the borrowed malfunctioning bike at the site. When I got back, I figured out what it is – or at least I have a good idea. It is a sweatbath. There have been a number of them reported both in historic contexts and in archaeological contexts, and I have collected a number of articles about them when we found one in the savannah about two miles inland on the Costayuc project.
That site, Tsikul, also had a ballcourt. Just like Trinidad. It was likely associated with a nearby capital, Dzibilchaltun, much like Trinidad’s connection with Motul de San José. And it is near water – was possibly even nearer when the area had canals running along the coast. Interesting parallels.
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