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


So, first, I have to figure out what I want to study. Archaeology is the study of ancient humans, so I could study nearly anything! Instead, I focus on craft production and architecture. So, I study the houses the Maya built and the things they made to be sold to other people. After I figure out what I want to study, I have to design a research plan that says exactly what I will do. This research plan will say where I want to dig, what I hope to accomplish by digging there, and what I will do with the stuff I dig up. Then, of course, I have to find a way to pay for all of that to happen!



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

Here is where I stayed during my first two summers of field work.

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


And this is essentially how we looked walking to work every day. 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.



Now I work at Xunantunich in a different area of Belize.

Here is where I dig!

That's a site map of a small portion of Xunantunich. I 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 conduct 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 am studying. I want 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.


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.





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). When I get home, I have to do less exciting stuff. Like… writing 130+ pages about everything I just told you and what I learned from it. ^.^


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

Do you have questions about archaeology? Ask me below!

I thought I would put up a few more photos.


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.

You are such a nerd <3 but I love this. Who said playin in the dirt isn't beneficial?

Oh my God Venus this is amazing. All of this is so fascinating, and it's so refreshing to see someone do something they're passionate about. Will you actually be able to do this as a paid career? 

I'm so interested in old civilisations etc but I would not have the patience required for all the careful digging and recording etc. What has been your most interesting 'find'?

Thank you! I love my job. ^.^

Yes, I will be able to do this as a paid career. In about a month I will see what it is like to apply anthropology to the business world. If that doesn't work out, then I will be looking for a career as an archaeologist in the United States for a private firm or the government. This means I would be more likely to work in a fast-paced environment, because most of the archaeology in the United States is done prior to construction projects for roads, buildings, pipelines, etc.

I've had a lot of interesting finds! My favorite finds are architecture, like this wall.


But! I realize that is not interesting to everyone. Lol. Last summer one of my workers found a ceramic figurine of a pregnant woman. Another interesting find were the burials I encountered two summers ago under the floor of a building.

wow all of this is so interesting!! I've never seen a real excavation before! your work is awesome!!!   

Thank you! ^.^ I would post more pictures from my excavations and the artifacts I collected, but I don't want to step on any toes by posting those pictures (project regulations, the prevention of looting, common courtesy, etc.)

Venus, you're having fun learning and discovering new things in your time in Belize. My Mom also expressed interest in archaeology, i.e. biblical and Meso-American. I wondered what's there not yet found in archaeology can change the way we view history and the past...it has to be found. Paleo-archaeology is also an exciting field whenever or wherever excavations of early man are, esp. the Cro-Magnon sites in southern France.