Unbelizeable First Week!-Gill Makes Things

Hello (Dios) from Belize!!

I arrived here on May 19th, for my archaeology field school, with 8 other students. I am taking two university courses while I’m here. We’re all working on a project lead by Meaghan, with her husband Shawn and three other *real adults*, in the Stann Creek District of Belize. We are staying in a village, in an idealistic spot with amazing hosts. They are so incredibly lovely and so is their business that they’ve set up. There is a main eating building in the centre, various cottages with rooms located all around, and amazing plants, trees, lizards, frogs and tarantulas (more on that later) all around and throughout. It really is a great base for us while we’re here, and I would recommend it if you are ever in this area. It’s also right by a jaguar reserve!!

We had a couple orientation days when we got here, to ease us into the weather, and the actual work we would be doing. Our hosts told us all about themselves and the work they do here. She is a Maya healer and he has done a lot of conservation work in the area. They really are marvellous.

The first couple days, we also learned how to plot out an excavation unit and do some surveying, had the profs check over our tools (make sure we brought the right ones), and began our culinary adventure here in Belize. Honestly, the food is so good. Especially for myself, being such a hassle as a Celiac vegetarian, they really do an incredible job. You can barely belize it!

Ixtuculil is a plant that you use to deal with stress, we thought it was an appropriate name for our group.

We finally went to the site on the Tuesday and met all of the Maya locals that are working with us. A lot of them have worked with Meaghan and Shawn before, when they were here in the past.

For our project, we are excavating three different operations in the site, two in the monumental core and one of the mounds out in the settlement area. I was assigned to the house mound excavation with two other students, Shawn, and Sylvestro and Mr. Paquiul who are from the area.

This is Kristine and Johana, the two students working with me!

What exactly do you do on an archaeological dig, you might ask? A whole lot of digging. First, you plot out your unit and set the corners and something called a datum, which is a set point that you measure from. Often, units are a very clean measurement, 1m x 1m or 2m x 2m. In our case, however, in 2016 they were arbitrarily digging down in a house mound and found a terrace face for the back of a house that seemed out of the ordinary, and wanted to explore further, so our unit was originally 2m x 2.4m. We started with just clearing out the top layers, which have been disturbed in the recent past. It’s important to keep nice clean, square corners and to dig down to the same level in the entire unit. On relatively flat ground, you don’t want one side to be much higher than the other (in the beginning, at least). And from there, you just keep going down. We keep anything important that we have found and clean them when we get back to base.

We dig every day from Tuesday to Friday, 7am to 3pm, with an hour break for lunch. They were long, hot days. In the afternoon or evening, we would either have lab (where we cleaned everything we found) or a lecture from either Shawn or Meaghan. On Friday nights, it's movie night! We watched a movie called Ixcanul, which is in Kekchi Maya, and is beautiful but very sad.

On the weekends, we have planned excursions. Saturday, we went to visit the Gulisi Garifuna Museum. The Garifuna are a group that lives in Belize, they are mixed descendants of West African, Central African, Island Carib, European and Arawak people. Miss Audrey gave us a tour and taught us all about the Garifuna people. Then two drummers and two dancers came and we watched their amazing singing and dancing. They also tried to get us to dance Punta with them, but a group of white people doing it is not a fun sight to behold.

After that, we headed to Mayflower, which is another archaeological site in the area. There are technically three sites there, Mayflower, Maintzunuun and T'au Witz. We had a snack lunch and wandered around looking at the structures there for a couple hours before heading to Hopkins for dinner. Oh, and I saw an anteater!

At Hopkins, we had some free time, so Niki and I walked around looking at shops before heading to the beach for a bit. We had dinner at Ella's Cool Place, which is on the beach. I had a tasty coconut curry on rice. There was also the cutest 10-week-old puppy there, too.

After dinner, we drove back to our base. On Sunday, we had breakfast and then were given the option to visit the Serpon Sugar Mill. Myself, my two roommates and our token male of the group all went and learned about how sugar was made in the area. They still have a lot of the old machinery.

We headed back and had lunch with everyone, and then went just down the road to visit a cacao farm and learn how chocolate is made! The cacao pods are harvested continuously (often every two weeks) throughout the season, and then are cracked open and the beans are dried in the sun. That takes about two weeks, as well. They are then sold to a buyer, in this case a chocolate shop, and made into chocolate, cacao powder or other wondrous chocolatey things. We got to try out making chocolate by hand.