Hope you enjoyed the tour, so far! As I explained at the very beginning, I used to be an archaeologist and I studied these types of sites every summer. I am going to tell you a little bit about what I used to do every summer, so you have an idea of what an archaeologist does.

And, FYI, this was written in 2014 when I was an archaeologist, but I'm not anymore. So, this is written in a mixture of present and past tense. There's too much to change. @.@


So, first, I had to figure out what I wanted to study. Archaeology is the study of ancient humans, so I could have studied nearly anything! Instead, I focused on craft production and architecture. So, I studied the houses the Maya built and the things they made to be sold to other people. After I figured out what I wanted to study, I had to design a research plan that says exactly what I wanted to do. This research plan said where I wanted to dig, what I hoped to accomplish by digging there, and what I would do with the stuff I dug up. Then, of course, I had to find a way to pay for all of that to happen! Research grants are amazing, by the way, but it takes hard work to get them. I got a few, but usually you cannot expect research grants to cover all costs.



Finally, I’m in Belize! Sometimes, I stayed in a log-building in the middle of a forest preserve with no running water or electricity other times I stayed in an old eco-hostel near a large village. No matter where I stayed I managed to find parasites, poisonous insects, and poisonous trees. But, not to worry! This just means I needed to itch or other unfortunate things a lot when I was digging. ^.^

Here is where I stayed during my first two summers of field work. We lived in wooden buildings in the middle of a forest preserve that was located about 20 minutes away from the nearest village. Electricity was limited, so there was no air conditioning, and there was no indoor plumbing. I really missed hot water while I was there.


Imagine sharing latrines with over 100 people for nearly two months. o.0

I only had to travel for about twenty minutes to get to my work area, but others had to walk down a steep incline for an hour. And, on the way out after the field day... walk up a steep incline for an hour. I was lucky, lol.


For my last two years as an archaeologist, I worked at Xunantunich in a different area of Belize.

Here is where I dug!

That's a site map of a small portion of Xunantunich. I used to work in a different area.

Xunantunich is a medium-sized archaeological site in Belize. It is a fairly popular tourist destination. All you need to do is cross a ferry, ride up a hill, and you are in an amazing, cleared site with tons of things to do and explore. Don’t worry, you won’t have to deal with anything that’ll bite, because the area is cleared where you’d be going.

I conducted my research at Group E, a portion of Xunantunich that was built really early before the rest of the site. So, the Maya built Group E, left Group E to build the big part of Xunantunich, and then some of them came back later to build houses amongst their deceased ancestors. That last group of people are who I studied. I wanted to know why they came back and what they were doing.


The ferry to cross the river to Xunantunich.


Usually, I have some undergraduate students or locals who live in the village to help me out. They do a lot of the digging while I write almost all of the notes (last season – about 70 pages worth of notes). The students are learning how to be archaeologists from me and from the locals. Some of the locals have been paid to help out at archaeological sites longer than I have been alive! They know a lot. There are many different methods to conduct archaeological research and not all of it relies on digging. My stuff, though, did rely a lot on digging. This is how we do it.

Remember how I said the Maya liked to build on top of stuff? That means we have to dig carefully or we’ll get confused. So, a typical method is to control how deep you dig and where you dig, so you can easily identify stuff later. Since we are more worried about where we find things, rather than the things themselves, we have to dig fairly slowly. When you find something really important, like a burial, then you have to dig even more slowly and spend more of your time taking notes. Notes are really important, because once you dig something up… you can’t undo it.




Usually half-way through the day we eat lunch. Lunch in the field is usually something out of a can or a simple sandwich. I would recommend canned corned beef with hot sauce, mustard, and crackers. There’s also one canned meat that has the same consistency as refried beans, so you can munch on that with tortilla chips. The local workers? Yeah, they are smarter and bring home-cooked meals.

But, never underestimate the power of combining hot sauce and different kinds of processed meat on bread! ... Yeah, I may be the only person on the dig who actually likes field lunches. But, don't get me wrong, dinner at the campsite was amazing. Just out my thread on Belizean food to get an idea of what we ate for breakfast and dinner.


A small selection of the types of canned meat available for field lunches.


Then, we dig some more. After all the digging and recording is done, I take all that stuff back to basecamp to analyze it. The most common things I find are broken pieces of pottery, stone tools, or the trash from making stone tools. All of that stuff usually has to be cleaned first with water and gentle brushing. When all my materials are dry, then I need to separate them, count them, and weigh them. I’ll separate them according to how I want to study them.

For example, those broken pieces of ceramic pots are separated according to what part of the pot they came from and whether or not it is a broken piece of ceramic that can tell me what type of part it was and when it was made. Depending on what knowledge I want to gain, I may focus on a certain aspect of the material I collected. For example, one of my fellow researchers wants to study how ceramic pots were used in feasts. She spent a lot of time putting the broken pieces of ceramic back together. Then, she’d measure and draw whatever portion of the ‘puzzle’ she was able to recreate.




One of the other archaeologists at Xunantunich is doing a really neat project involving the Castillo!

Basically, she is going to create a lot of 3-D images of this giant building during different periods of time to see how it was constructed. Check it out!
Virtual Archaeological Reconstruction



That is a part of a wall, likely a foundation for another building.


Sometimes archaeologists want to look at a large area, but don't have a lot of time. So, we do something called a 'shovel test.' We dig a hole of a standard size at predetermined intervals. This means we take a small sample of a large area, so we can better understand where to dig a much bigger hole. The sticks in the picture are marking where a shovel test will be placed.


And this little guy is pretty important to my research. This is a stone tool. It has a specific shape that has shown up at other archaeological sites in the region of Belize I work in. A lot of researchers call them 'drills,' but a colleague and I do not think they were used to drill anything. I am researching the people (or, more specifically, the house some of them may have lived in) who made these specific stone tools in really, really big numbers. I'm also researching where these tools were used within archaeological sites in my region, so I might be able to better understand what they were used to create.



Eventually, I leave Belize (most likely without any of the stuff I collected during my digging. It is very bad form to take such stuff back to your home country without permission, because essentially you are stealing someone’s heritage). And, once I returned home, I would analyze my findings (yay statistics!) and write up my research to be published. The first thing I did when I got home? Shower with hot water and wash every piece of clothing I took with me, because jungle stink follows you.

Publishing The Research
So, publishing the research can take a long time, because you have a lot of research you need to consolidate into a little package that can be understood by fellow researchers and the general public. I do have a few published works, such as my undergraduate and master's thesis, but I've also published in an international journal and a technical journal. If you'd like to read the journal articles, which are roughly 10 to 20 pages each, I will gladly send you a copy via email.

If you really, really want to read them, then I have copies of my undergraduate and master's thesis, but those are a longer read at about 100 to 200 pages each.

Also, you are expected to share your research results by presenting at local, national, and international conferences. As a graduate and undergraduate student, I typically presented about three or four times a year. If you would rather look at pictures and limited text, then I will also gladly send you to my LinkedIn page, which has copies of my PowerPoint presentations.

Uhhhhhhh thanks for sharing your experience <3!!!! this was so interesting to read!

Uhhhhhhh you are welcome (: