Casualty

We kind of wrapped up excavations last Friday (at least until the rainy season is over - not that it's started yet). We also had our first casualty. I thought Marshalltowns were better than this!


Looks like we might have a river cobble house floor, so I really want to get a few more weeks of digging in, maybe in March?

And....we're back!

Wow, I've neglected this blog for far too long! It's been quite a busy month and a half, filled with visits from the in-laws, rubbernecking with politicians, stomach viruses, and dissertation related paranoia.

We met Steve's parents when their flight arrived in Guayaquil on November 1. We came right back out to Dos Mangas to celebrate Dia de los Santos. I wish I had a photograph of the crowds in the bus station who were traveling for the holiday. It was an absolute madhouse, with people stacked back to back. I think I really impressed Dad/Gene by the way I was able to get us right up to the ticket counter.

We spent a lovely day on the 2nd walking through Dos Mangas and stopping at friends houses and getting food foisted upon us. To celebrate the day of the dead, families prepare tons of foods, particularly the favorites of those who have passed, and lay it all out on a table. Then, while the family goes off to visit the grave site, the dead come and "eat" their food. Then the family comes back and people start circulating from house to house, eating up all the goodies. We got to try a few new delicacies that day! We also wandered down to the futbol field (soccer, for most of you) and watched a pretty good game in which Dos Mangas tied 4-4 with the near-by town of Olon.

One of the tables, all laid out.

That was pretty much the end of our adventures while Steve's parents were visiting. Mom/Norma picked up a bug while they were in Miami and then passed it on to Dad and eventually Baby Girl and me (though I definitely got a mild version of it). Mom and Dad spent a lot of time resting and bonding with their granddaughter. It was so great to see how much she loves her Oma and Opa. We even got to celebrate her 2nd birthday together, albeit a few days early.

Yes, that's right folks, my Baby Girl is now 2 years old! I may have to start referring to her as Big Girl, but BG will still work. The tantrums have also started, but so has all the extra fun!

On the 14th, Dos Mangas inaugurated a new Interpretation Center for the tourists who come for the hikes to the waterfall, etc. I put together a little display about the archaeological project and they hung that up there too. The Center was sponsored by the Ministry of Tourism, and the Minister of Tourism herself, Veronica Sion, came for the inauguration. She didn't know that there was any archaeology in the area, and was really excited about integrating it into the other tourism offerings. To the community's benefit she pledge her support for building a museum to house and display the artifacts once the excavations are over. It was really cool to meet her, get to talk a little bit, be mentioned in a speech by a big-wig, get interviewed a few times, and get lecture requests. We'll see what all comes with it, and I'm still looking for her speech on You Tube, but it was a really exciting day!

Me and Veronica Sion at the inauguration.

About a week after BG got over her illness (which required breathing treatments and antibiotics) she started vomiting, to the point where she'd even puke up sips of water. I also came down with perpetual nausea (I think I would have felt better if I'd just puked) and Steve had to deal with all kinds of digestive issues. Back to the doctor for more meds, and now everyone's better again, though BG is still puking on bus rides, which may mean she suffers from motion sickness (and let me tell you, a freaked out toddler puking on a bus is no fun at all, particularly when you can't get her to aim in the bag and she'd sitting on your lap).

Work at the site is drawing rapidly to a close, and I'm really not feeling confident about what I've been able to excavate. The much-desired house is still elusive, and I don't see us being able to find and excavation one completely in the next week. All I need is one (two would be better), just one, to be able to compare it to other sites! Instead of a house we've found two more burials this week. How many dead people are there?!?!!? I suppose I'll just keep plugging along, and hopefully it will all work out.

Things to look forward to: a Christmas visit by Steve's cousin Kathy and her husband David, and a trip to Cuenca for the Christmas Eve parade. And, mostly likely in time for my birthday, the long awaited visit by my parents!

And, I promise I'll update more frequently!

Seriously, what is with the dead people?

I either have the best or the worst luck. It seems like no matter where we put an excavation unit, or for what purpose, we keep ending up with skeletons! We’re trying to dig a pit through to sterile (non-cultural) soil to document the time periods of the site. All I want is pottery to match up to some other sites. So of course we find another burial. The very edge of it skims the unit that we’re working in, but of course it’s the edge that contains an entire (though fractured) vessel, which is now sticking out of the wall. Previous experience has told me that things like that left in the wall of an excavation unit won’t stay there for long, so we’re having to open an adjacent unit to do this thing right and get that person out of there.

Mapping Buen Suceso

I spent the first four days back at work with my guys mapping the site. This had been postponed because when we first came to Ecuador, back in June, my telescoping level ended up left in a corner behind the front door when we went to the airport. Even though it was shipped via FedEx on June 10, it has STILL not cleared customs here in Ecuador! So, when we were home this time I bought a second one and didn’t let that sucker out of my sight!

So it took a long time, and it was tedious, but here are the fruits of our labor:

Murphy's Law for Archaeologists...

...dictates that on your last day of excavation before an extended break, when you decide to go ahead and excavate just one more level, you will invariably find something that either a) completely changes your interpretation of the entire site, or b) will be impossible for you to excavate completely and properly in the time left to you.

Today was our last day of excavation for the next three weeks while the family and I return to the States for a visit. So of course we found another burial. This one seems to be largely intact and includes ribs and a pelvis! Unfortunately, the legs and head are going into two other units which would have to be excavated before this guy can be removed. I'm sure you can understand my hesitation about leaving any bones lying around the site, but it can't be avoided. Hopefully our lids on the units will keep people away and this individual will still be waiting for my trowel when I get back!

What I did this week....

This is the burial that we came across in one of our excavation units. Don't know if it's male or female because the pelvis is missing, and can't estimate age because the skull with teeth weren't intact. This poor person's been through a lot though. The entire lower half of the body is missing (possibly cut by a large pit that was dug later), and there was a lot of compaction and fracturing of the bones. All that remains is part of the skull, an arm and hand, and several fractured ribs. There is also an animal burrow that runs underneath the body, and in the wall of this burrow we found a femur and several finger or toe bones, which may belong to the same individual.

Early Valdivia burial with shell inside the skull cavity (upper left of photo).

One interesting thing to note is the shell located inside the cranium (or where the cranium would have been if not for the actions of our neighborhood looter). It's impossible to know for sure, due to the damage done to the skull, but it's possible that this shell was inserted into the individual's mouth prior to burial.

I went to Ecuador and all I found was a lousy Valdivia village…

So the last few weeks have found your intrepid adventurer embroiled in a bit of personal turmoil. If you will remember, I came here to carry out research on frontier identities of the late pre-Hispanic Manteño culture (800-1532 AD). Despite some tantalizing surface evidence of a reasonable sized Manteño occupation in this valley, most of our excavations turned up very little sub-surface evidence of this habitation. It’s been quite demoralizing because what seemed so clear back home – both in terms of excavation locations and research questions – became a lot less so when I got here. I suppose it’s to be expected, but it’s disheartening nonetheless.

Salvation (and possibly damnation) came in the form of my field assistant, Luis, who was also my guide when I was here back in 2006 for the survey. My assistants were well aware of my increasing despondency and fear that I’d never make a dissertation out of what we’d been uncovering. He took me out to a field where we surveyed in 2006, but the vegetation is much less dense this year. Quite visible on the surface now, but hidden then, was a quantity of artifacts to die for. I seriously wanted to weep, and not only because here, at last, could be the kind of reasonably contained site that would be great for a project, but also because few of the ceramics I turned over with my toe were Manteño. Most were from the preceding Guangala culture, but others pre-dated even that.

I consulted the two most intellectually important women in my life – my current and former advisors – to ask their opinions of whether to pursue this new site. The answer was the same; go where the artifacts are, the significance will become clear. Part of me doesn’t like that, because I worked long and hard to come up with a research question that would get funded (the ultimate test, right?), but also because I sincerely am deeply interested in both the Manteño period and processes of identity formation and negotiation. But, as work was wrapping up in a third unproductive location, I decided to take their advice, and began work at the new site this past Monday.

From the start it’s been heady. We are uncovering so many remains it is ridiculous. In the week we’ve been there I think we’ve managed to match the quantity of artifacts that we recovered in the past month, if not the past two. In four randomly placed test pits we’ve got a trash pit, post holes of two different structures, and a human burial. And as fantastic as that is, it’s all Valdivia!!!!!! Now, I know some of you will say, so what? Well, Valdivia is the oldest ceramic culture in coastal Ecuador, dating as far back as 3500 BC. Yes, that’s right, I went out to dig Manteño and ended with something nearly 5000 years earlier. It’s like going out to buy a bicycle and coming home with a velocipede – cool, but not quite what you had in mind. I’ve just never really been that in to Valdivia, what with it being so early, and so Valdivia-y. Also, the vast majority of my training in Ecuadorian archaeology has focused on the Manteño period, so I’m in uncharted territory here.

The new site, on a rain drenched day, in 360 view.

Looking on the bright side, though, it looks as if I might have a tidy little elliptical-shaped village on my hands, with several other similar sites in the region that I can compare it to (like Loma Alta – just 12km away – and Real Alto, for those of you in the know). Now, however, I’ve really got to dig in, figuratively and literally, so that I’m up on the scholarship and don’t miss anything, and also so I can start working out the good research questions. I just wish I’d seen the site three years ago. I don’t know if it would have completely changed my research question, or if I would have chosen another place to work. At the very least it would have given me a chance to get used to the idea. At the moment I’m really glad that my assistants’ knowledge of English is somewhat limited, because my vocabulary has gotten quite colorful over the last few days, and I wouldn’t want them to think any less of me.

The Mound, a flood, and the Levantamiento (not necessarily in that order)

So, I’m realizing to my horror that it’s been nearly a month since I’ve updated the blog. A lot has been happening, not the least of which was Baby Girl baptizing my computer with a cup of tea. Between taking it apart to mop up the tea and let everything dry, and then waiting until I could get to Libertad to buy a new keyboard (the one casualty of the whole affair) I lost nearly two weeks of computer usage. But, we’re up and running again, so all is well in the world.

The community has been embroiled in a fairly interesting and lengthy political demonstration for the last few weeks to assert their control of community lands and access to different resources on community property. This has mainly consisted of blocking the main road going in and out of town, and setting up a 24 hour guard to monitor the traffic going in and out of town. It all started when someone who leases community lands decided that they’d go and fence off the road that the community uses to take tourists to some very pretty cascading pools of water, effectively declaring both that portion of the road and the pools to be private property. These same leasees also waved guns at community members as they went along this road, for trespassing on their “property”. The community set up the blockade to prevent these people from moving freely to and from the land that they are leasing.

As you might imagine, the police and local and provincial governments got involved in this dispute, which still does not have a resolution. The leasees claim that the community is trying to kick them off the land (and there is some claim on their part that they bought this land, though that is impossible because the whole territory belongs to the community), while the community contends that the leasees are trying to develop tourism privately and thus deprive the community of an important source of revenue. You might be able to guess where my sympathies lie. I got invited along by community members on one of the inspections by the provincial government because I could record video with my camera. The rhetoric each side was using was really interesting – “cultural patrimony” versus “my property” – and it was also pretty clear that the Inspector (the third one to check out the situation) was fairly well in the pocket of the leasees. There is certainly a lot at stake in the outcome of this dispute; not only the livelihood of community members but their physical safety as well. In the course of the dispute it was revealed that one of the leasees was released from jail just a few years ago after serving 13 years for robbery and double homicide. And most of the problems started after he arrived on the scene.

Last weekend Steve and I became godparents to a newly married couple in the village. It’s not the same as becoming godparents to an infant – more like a cross between being godparents and the best man/matron of honor – which made it all the odder that we didn’t really know these people that well. It was one of those things, though, where I felt like I couldn’t say no, like the act of asking obligated us. Steve was still sick, so put in a brief appearance with Baby Girl and then took her home to sleep. I on the other hand had to stay and drink until the wee hours of the morning, and even then I chickened out and headed home around 3. I just don’t have the stamina for it like I used to.

On Thursday we closed up excavations at the mound. I was actually quite disappointed in how things turned out. The mound appears to be a natural hill that was modified to have a platform on top. The surface is covered in artifacts, but we found virtually no sub-surface features. I was particularly keen to find a structure on the top of the mound, but alas, no joy. There was also very little evidence for use of the flat space around the mound. We did test pits every 5m to recover evidence of different use areas or house floors, but got very little for our efforts. It’s definitely made me question my interpretation a bit more, but I don’t have any new answers.

I feel like the community might be getting a bit disappointed, because they want me to find things that they can use to start a museum, but so far it’s just been the usual ceramic fragments (though my friend Alex reminded me that the spindle whorls, copper bell, and copper tweezers that we found up at the cistern are pretty good by coastal Ecuador standards). Hopefully they have patience with me, and all of our hard work will turn up something interesting and also let us tell the story of life at Dos Mangas back in the day.

The house situation is still at a standstill. We found another place in the community that is REALLY nice, even by general North American standards (hot water and a bathtub – HEAVEN!) but we just can’t afford what the owner wants for monthly rent (like, twice as much(. Right now it’s a bit of a poker game…do we come up a bit, spending money out of savings, and hope that he realizes that he can either rent to us at a lower price and make some money or have an empty house and make no money. We’ll keep you all up to date as thing progress.

Oh yeah, the archaeology

So I guess I'm a little behind on updating about my project. We're entering the fourth week of the project now, which I find really hard to believe. We started working at what we've called the cistern, a depression on the top of a hill that was supposedly filled with water and used as part of a Manteno irrigation system.
Now, after a few weeks of digging a trench into the side of the thing, I am pretty confident that it never held water, or at least never intentionally. It looks as if it was a natural depression that was dug out and used as a trash pit, possibly for a single event, like a feast. The analysis is on-going, of course, but we're hauling bags of ceramics out of each level, and tons of big charcoal fragments for dating, and finding some cool things like copper bells and tweezers, spindle whorls, a human hand, and the first obsidian blade for the site.

We also began some work at the platform mound by digging test pits every 5m in the surrounding area. Differences in soil types will tell us if there was any surface preparation (possibly for a plaza) and also give us a sense of the usage intensity across that space. So far the deposits are the same across 50-100m and give no indication of a prepared floor. Artifacts are few in number, but there do appear to be some hot spots. Once we wrap up things at the "cistern" (which will be tomorrow if the powers-that-be cooperate), we'll head down to the mound to finish test pitting and begin excavations of the mound itself.

The "laboratory" (my living room) is quickly filling up with bags of artifacts that need to be washed, labeled, and photographed. Lab work is much trickier when you have a toddler who wants to look at all the pieces too. Hopefully we can work out some kind of storage solution within the next few days, or at least a way to cordon off that space.

My helper (aka Taylor) leaves for home on Sunday, so I'm trying to make the most of the time that we have!

Taylor holding the first piece of ceramic that she found at the site!