Summer 2002

Kathy Kamp and John Whittaker ventured into Maya archaeology last summer. Funded by a grant from the Luce Foundation, we excavated a small housemound near the ceremonial center of El Pilar, Belize, where Anabel Ford of UC Santa Barbara has a long-term project. The grant provided support for 2 Grinnell students (Jennifer Thornton and Alex Woods) and two Belizean students (Melissa Badillo and Zerifeh Eiley) to work five weeks in Belize and five weeks in Grinnell.

Chiik Nah (Coati House, named for a friendly visitor) was a small mound of rocks in an area of secondary forest growth (enough small trees to cut off the breeze but too small to provide shade). Temperatures ranged from hot to pressure cooker and humidity from muggy to stifling. Rains in the last week made backfilling an event suitable for the Iowa State Fair.

We had lab, living quarters, and kitchen in the Santa Familia Monastery in San Ignacio. The food was good, the rooms adequate, and we had no snake stories, although “doctor flies” and mosquitoes extracted a fair amount of nutrition from us, and I invented a new dance step when I found a scorpion in my pants. On days off we visited a number of other Maya sites in Belize and Tikal in Guatemala, swam in the rivers, and sampled barbequed chicken stands along the road in town.

Excavation of the mound revealed two plaster floors, suggesting a long use of the site. It would have been an oval or rectangular platform supporting a small house of wattle and daub with palm-thatched roof. The artifacts were those of simple folk, although a few bits of Guatemalan obsidian show that they could obtain some exotic trade goods.  Back at Grinnell we analyzed our collection of eroded plain ware sherds, which suggest occupation on the mound in both the Early and Late Classic periods, a span of several hundred years.  There were also lots of stone tools, mostly simple flake tools, including a lot of pointy “gravers” indicating a craft activity involving drilling or carving wood, shell, or some other hard material which naturally has perished. For comparison, we also analyzed stone tools from two other sites in the area.

Grinnellians are infiltrating Belize. Two recent alums (Jenny Haggar and Sally Graver) have worked on archaeological projects there, and Sally returned last summer as the human osteologist for the Belize Valley project not far from us.  The current US Ambassador to Belize is Russell Freeman ’61, who visited the site with a massive ambassadorial vehicle and a welcome cooler of iced drinks, and subsequently entertained us with a fancy dinner at the Ambassadorial Residence in Belize City. While we were picnicking with him at El Pilar, two geologists arrived, and when we were introduced as from Grinnell, one turned out to be Mark Brenner ’73, now teaching geology at the University of Florida.

In August, we spent 2 weeks in Flagstaff, surveying and recording sites in about 2.5 square km between our exavation sites at New Caves and Fortress Hills. Three of our summer students worked with us, as well as four other volunteers, and we located and recorded over 60 small prehistoric sites, ranging from small pueblo structures and pithouse villages to rock cairns, basalt quarries, and petroglyph panels.  One of the pleasures of working in archaeology is the way friends and students will slog through brush in the sun, climb rock piles, and stumble over snakes for almost nothing – the adventure of seeing a few tumbled stones and pot sherds, and three good meals (and even dusty egg salad tacos are a good lunch after a morning in the field).