Guatemala Work

At high noon on 12 May 2003 I arrived at the Rio Mopan lodge in Melchor de Mencos, Guatemala. I had been kicking around Central America for about a month and had memorized the time and place: I had to be there if I wanted to work at the deep jungle Maya urban site of Holmul.

Holmul gave me three things: 1) very good friends; 2) fodder for my trashy archaeology novel; 3) a heaping amount of confidence in myself. Standing on the cab of a pick up truck screaming 'get me out of here' into a satellite phone will do that. As I was leaving Holmul, a friend there suggested I come with her to work on a project in Bolivia the following summer and the rest is history, except that Holmul has a way of haunting you. Again, read my novel once I write it.

In 2009 I was asked to present at a conference entitled From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the ‘Heritage’ of Empire, c. 1820–1940 put on by the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group: an odd proposition for someone like me who works in very modern Bolivia. It occurred to me, however, that my experiences at Holmul amounted to really quite an interesting case study for concepts of preservation in the early 1900s.

You see at Holmul I re-excavated a building that had been excavated about 90s years before by an archaeologist out of Harvard in, reportedly, the first stratigraphic (scientific) of a Maya site. He died before completing his report on the site (curse? my novel!) and a report was completed for him by a man who had never visited the site itself.

The main assertion of my work on this subject is that publication served as the primary mode of preservation of the remote jungle sites of the Americas at this time. They were just so darned deep in the jungle that the archaeologists of the day believed no visitors would ever go to the sites plus real site stabilization was logistically impossible. Holmul is an extreme case of this: the excavator died BUT a report needed to exist so that the site may be preserved (and used by scholars) and thus a report was published, complete with a variety of errors that were only made obvious as I stood in front of the building in question. I also re-found an unexcavated tomb that had been located in 1911 but was not present in the published report.

Papers

My original paper presented at the conference is available here
The slides that accompany this paper are available here: warning, it is huge! The chapter on this subject that will be in an upcoming British Academy monograph is available here; it is only a draft at the moment but you get the picture.