The Archaeology

I've never been so dirty before in my life, and yet I'm totally cool with that.

Each morning we head to our sites around 7am. I was assigned to Tulix Mul, which is about a half hour drive from base camp. The site is pretty awesome. It's small, but compact. It is right along the edge of some beautiful rolling hills, but situated within a small jungle patch. It is very sunny, which sometimes makes the heat unbearable, but we take shade and water breaks. And at least it is not too buggy, like most of the other sites. So we don't have to worry about that, which is nice.

The site has a lot of structures which we are working on unveiling. A lot of the work is picking and shoveling and hauling buckets, but I enjoy it. I guess I'm working on my muscles... Our team is wonderful so that makes it all worth while. We each have a team nickname and we joke that we have the best site and the best team.

We work for about 8 hours each day, with a lunch break. We leave around 3 or 3:30 to head back to camp. Overall, the work is difficult sometimes but definitely worth it. I've learned so much about techniques and practices. And we've found some amazing things so far!

We've uncovered tons of ceramic pottery shards. In the main structure we uncovered a cache in the doorway with a pot and a whole obsidian blade, plus a skeleton underneath! There's also another room leading off from the main one that we are eventually going to break into. It's really cool because we think the back wall may have been built to block off more of the room behind it. Hopefully we'll be able to find out more.

Our main job has been uncovering walls of the buildings. Hills have developed on top of them through time. So we had to dig through that to find the wall and reveal it. So that's what we've been spending a lot of time on this week. We make great progress though, and already have a lot done. We have really good teamwork and we've figured out a great tag team process. It's pretty great.

At the end of the day back at camp we're all pretty exhausted. Just awake enough to take a cold shower and eat dinner. Some nights we have a lecture. Otherwise we have free time to do whatever. We go to bed early since we get up so early, but sometimes we hang out in the palapa and socialize for a bit. It's pretty relaxing after a hard day's work.