Ok, so here’s a recap of my second week on the island. This first week on the job in Vega Baja has been something of a whirlwind between starting the excavations in Manatà and dealing with obstacles at the apartment like the fridge dying right after we stocked up on cheap/bulk frozen fruits and veggies and my brand new laptop having issues booting up. Ay ay ay! >_<
As for the field, things are slow going so far. We are running a bit behind schedule for several reasons so hopefully next week we can pick up the pace. For starters, they’ve been having issues with water at the plantation so we are not able to water-sieve our soil samples and now have quite a backlog of them to process. Right now we have two 1x1 meter units open, Unit 4 and Unit 2E. We are finding tons of material in Unit 4 like ceramic and wooden buttons, animal teeth, a metal key, spoon and ceramic sherds, glass sherds, pieces of brick, mortar, etc by the bucketload, which is both awesome and frustrating (the more artifacts found, the slower the digging goes).
Unit 2E
Unit 2E at a later level, further down
This dig is definitely a change of pace from the pre-Colombian projects I’ve worked on in the past. It’s a very interesting projects but a lot less exhilarating to find chunks of brick as opposed to flint-knapped lithic stone tools haha. Unit 2E doesn’t have much cultural material aside from brick, though an intact porcelain button was found yesterday! The soil in Unit 2E has been a royal pain due to compression from sandbags used to prevent flooding of Unit 2 during the last excavation season; we had to start out with a pick axe and shovels in order to bust through it. Did I mention the wind has been relentless?! We’ve already gone through two canopies, one of which we brought to the field brand new and it broke in a day. Every day we have to figure out new ways to jerry rig them to withstand these gusts fueled by what must be the powers of Aura, Lelantos and Perses combined!
I will say, the mosquitoes here are not so bad and I’m sure the insane wind helps with that a bit, so that’s a plus. However, there is one thing the plantation is covered with: ants! FIRE ants to be exact and man do they pack a nasty little itchy punch when they sting you!! The most frustrating part about their bites is that they can spread if you scratch them open and they do not respond to bug repellent. Needless to say I have already acquired quite a few and am one very itchy archaeologist, but I guess that’s just the nature of the trade. And at least they’re the only real insect threat I have to worry about here, whereas in Belize you are have to be on constant alert for dangerous creepers and crawlers!
It’s easy to become focused on the negative with so many things going wrong but for now I’ll count my blessings.
