Adjusting to Home and Reflecting on the Fieldseason

Hi again,

Well I have now been officially home for a week and thought I should let you know how the readjustment was going. There have been many moments of using the wrong language to say thank you or please, much disorientation and confusion, and occasional loneliness. It is always so wonderful to come home to my family who I miss so very much when I'm in the field, but it is challenging too and very difficult to explain to someone who hasn't lived it.  I think reverse culture-shock can be harder is some ways because people expect you to be your 'normal self' the moment you get back, maybe tired but normal- after all this is your normal environment. They ask how your trip was and there is nothing to say other than "great"... you can't explain or summarize what you have been through, seen, experienced, or felt. If you're anything like me you are still trying to first figure out where you are, what you are doing, and which language to use and second trying to process all that your just experienced.

The last time I returned home from the field my amazing wife had printed out a map of Target's layout and wrote in labels of where to find the things I need! She did this because of previous years when I was lost and overwhelmed in Target. It is tough to explain reverse culture shock but it is a feeling of confusion and being lost in your own home town. It really is a disorientation and I still find myself asking "What's wrong with me?" or telling myself to snap out of it. The reality is that it just takes time and can be a good opportunity to see some cultural differences.

This time was a bit less disorienting because it was only a month of fieldwork but I think I re-enter the culture in Central America more quickly each time I go into the field so there is still some reverse culture-shock. Last week I found myself driving a very familiar route a day after being home and getting momentarily lost. Loneliness is also very common for me when coming from Central American culture to the U.S. While I get to be with my family which makes me so happy, it is a cultural component that often makes me lonely.  When in Joya de Ceren there are always people around when you walk outside your door, you overhear the conversations of other people (and the roosters and dogs and trucks and horns and car alarms) all day and all night, and there is a much different idea of privacy (which honestly can make me a bit crazy when in the field!). So upon returning home it feels lonely to only share my house with one other person and to not have neighbors and people to talk to at every moment of every day. It takes about a week or so for this to pass.

This year upon my return we had a previously scheduled camping trip with some of our friends. We were running the "Dirty Dash" and camped out with friends all weekend. This made for a much different re-entry experience, since camping is much like life in Joya de Ceren. You can hear conversations even when in your 'private space' and  the majority of time is spent in shared areas. While getting home and turning around immediately to leave again was tough, it was really fun to get to share some time with my wife and friends and it made the re-entry a bit less lonely than usual.

My Team (I'm on the far right of this photo)

Another Group Photo

I'm starting to feel a bit back to myself and now am enjoying not hearing conversations or having to talk to people all day long! A little less disoriented and overwhelmed each day. Who knows maybe tomorrow I'll start opening all that mail and get back to the normal business of life at home. For now, let me say thank you for reading along with me during this trip. It was so much fun to share these experiences with you and I really hope you enjoyed reading it. I am very grateful for such a loving and supportive family that makes fieldwork like this possible and to have the amazing opportunities I've been given.

I think this should be our Christmas card this year

I hope you were able to get a small glimpse of life in the field and that it might inspire you to explore the world around you be that for the first or the ten-thousandth time. I have met such extraordinary people- from those I've known for years to those that taught me to keep experiencing as much of life as I can while I'm here. My new friends who are currently sailing around the world (talk about an inspiration) when asked if they were scared aboard their ship crossing the Atlantic responded "You just have to trust that she'll float".  That applies to so many things in my life and has become a new personal mantra. It is just one small piece of what I take with me from this adventure.

My wife and I are waving to you from a rope obstacle

I don't think anyone can come home from fieldwork unchanged. Each time the challenge, the fun, the extraordinary opportunity to experience the world anew leaves me more grateful for all I have and also more inspired to really engage with the world around me and enjoy my days!  Thank you to all who make my journeys so extraordinary. The world is truly an amazing place and there are so many good, interesting, inspiring people in it!  See... isn't anthropology fun?!?!

Homecoming

We returned the rental car, checked into the hotel near the airport, and awaited our flight home. The hotel stay felt a bit strange after being in the field and even more bizarre were the number of English conversations we heard and being approached by people speaking to us in English. We spend so much time in a region where very little English is spoken or used and it can be somewhat jarring to still be in El Salvador but to be in a more tourist region of the country.

We did enjoy getting to watch the Olympics and also to use the pool! People responded somewhat surprised to us as we would reply and speak with them in Spanish. The woman in the gift shop was very impressed with our research and to hear us speaking Spanish. Apparently many of the business travels do not speak Spanish.

We flew home the next day. In Houston I had a short connection and the security line after customs was extremely long (you have to go back through security once you claim your bags and re-check them). A few nice people let me cut in front of them in line and after a mad dash through Houston airport I just barely made my flight. As I went to sit down I said excuse me to the couple in the aisle and middle seats and thank you... only to sit down and realize I'd just said that to them in Spanish. I laughed and then apologized in English saying that I clearly wasn't sure where I was currently!  :)

It was wonderful to see my wife and I was so happy to be home...even if my luggage didn't quite make it with me.  The pugs were so happy to have their other mama back that I could hardly get in the front door! 

The Pug Attack upon my return! Theo made funny excited snort noises we had never heard before!

Stay tuned.. I will update you on what it is like to be back and the reverse culture shock / strange experiences of returning to life as normal here at home.

Wrapping Up the Field Season

As we wrap up our 2012 field season, it has truly been unlike any other.  Our experience in planting and now harvesting manioc has allowed up to gain new insight into our archaeological research. It has also led to at least one Salvadorian farmer taking up organic planting. 

A few significant observations:
1. Growth of manioc can be very variable based on the micro-location growing conditions (e.g. the difference between our manioc plants in the there locations was very large).

Manioc Tubers from Field Plot 1

Manioc Tubers from Field Plot 3

Manioc Tubers from Field Plot 2

2. Culture plays a very powerful role in how people plant their food. Even when asked specifically to plant a certain way and having explained our research thoroughly, farmers still continued to plant manioc in the traditional way they were taught.

3. While we cannot confirm it due to the data issues we had, large manioc beds do seems to provide more drainage of water, somewhat less compacted soils, and appear to offer a slight advantage in harvesting.

4. Harvesting large manioc (the size of which the Classic Maya at Ceren were growing) is extremely difficult. It take the effort of multiple people working together. This leads me to believe that the ancient Ceren farmers had a large work group together in order to harvest the large amount of manioc that they did in such a short period of time. This fits with the idea that there was a large harvest underway at the site where many people gathered together to help with the harvesting.

Working Hard to Harvest Manioc

All in all it was a very successful field project, even if it did not go exactly as planned!

A few Museo Fotos for you! (David J. Guzman Museo, San Salvador)

We went to the national museum in San Salvador a few times this trip. There we met with many officials and made sure that the government and local archaeologists were updated on our research, as well as our future plans. The is the museum to which we accession all of our artifacts when we are excavating. The museum has a special Joya de Ceren area that is well looked after and very restricted in access.

On one of these museum trips we made sure to take time to look around again. Within the last year they opened an area that shows the religions of El Salvador and information about Maya and Pipil religions. Those photos came out a bit strange given the red lighting in the room.


Enjoy a look at just some of the artifact and remember that as archaeologists we are much more interested in the information artifacts can tell us about the past than in the objects themselves!

Statue of Dr. David J. Guzman

Called the Virgin of Tazumal (no one seems to know why the stelea is called this)

Petroglyphs found in El Salvador

A Maguay Plant Cast from Ceren

Obsidian knives and blades

Various artifacts including Jade axes (upper left) and various ceramic vessels

Pole fence cast from Ceren

Mano and Metate (top) and two mortar and pestles (bottom)

Ceramic Vessel

Jaguar Marker

Jaguar with person in the mouth

(Huehueteotl- very old deity in Mesoamerica)

New Deity descriptions from the site

Tlaloc- Mesoamerican deity of rain/water

Quetzalcoatl- Mesoamerican deity known from many sites throughout Meso.

Jaguar Head

Lithic Escentric (9 similar ones were found in Honduras at the site of Copan- Payson will be the first to do a detailed study of these this coming fall.  The skill with which these have been made continues to amaze archaeologists. It is thought was was a staff of office that might have been held by a ruler to symbolize their power. It has been interpreted as a ruler with a possible headdress and/or ancestors around this person.

Large ceramic vessel- the spikes are thought to represent a young ceiba tree (the ceiba tree is very important in Maya cosmology)

Toy with wheels- The Maya are not known to have used the wheel for anything other than toys

Ceramic Typology (Preclassic Period)

Display of a Preclassic Burial (There are very different ideas about excavating the dead from country to country. In general in Central America the display and excavation of human burials are very common and accepted by many communities- this is a much more contested practice in the United States for example)

Another Preclassic Burial Displayed

Ceramic Typology: Classic Period

Ceramic Typology: Postclassic Period

Ceramic Figurines and Molds

Jade Jewlery

Ceramic Stamps

Jade Beads and Jewelry

From the Traveling Peruvian Silver Art Exhibit

Manioc Harvest Day 3: The Power of Culture

Hi again,

Time to catch you up on the last part of our fieldwork. Manioc Harvest Day 3 was yet another interesting lesson for us gringos. We arrived at Alejandro's house early in the morning and began to record the basic information about the place where we'd planted manioc. He owns animals such as horses, goats, dogs, and chickens and the area where we were working was well fertilized (it smelled well fertilized too!)

VERY LARGE MANIOC PLANTS

Test Plot 3: Alejandro's House

One of the horses

Wild Animals of El Salvador ;)

In any event, as we began by mapping the spacing and location of each plant we noticed how large these plants were. The stalks were much bigger in diameter and there were many plants growing from single locations. Unfortunately during this time we also noticed that the initial manioc beds we had planted for our experiment had not been maintained here either! This was very disappointing since we then are not able to test exactly what we thought we were testing. 

Very Large Manioc Plants WITHOUT beds!

Manioc Plant

Yet as often happens in anthropological research, there are unexpected findings and questions you hadn't thought to initial ask. In this case, the power of culture when it comes to planting.  Asking a farmer to plant crops in a different way is a much bigger task than we had realize. These farmers had worked with us on the excavating of manioc fields in years past. They understood our research and had seen what the manioc beds looked like during the Classic Period Maya era. We had given clear instructions about how to maintain the beds and in two out of our three cases, the manioc beds were abandoned, seen as unnecessary and not the 'right way' to grow manioc. Asking these farmers to plant manioc in this new and bizarre way was going against all of their training and years of cultural education about plants. This prompted many discussions amongst us anthropologists about how powerful culture can be, particularly when it comes to something as fundamental as our food.

Despite our disappointment at the lack of manioc beds, we harvested and recorded the manioc in Test Plot 3 as we had done at the other locations. We found that the manioc here was much larger than in previous locations and seems someone similar to the sizes of what we find in the archaeological record. Alejandro and our team agreed that this large growth was likely facilitated by the very well fertilized soil in that area.

Another area of data that we recorded was the number of tubers that remained in the ground during harvesting. This was important for our purposes because the manioc beds at Ceren found so far had all been harvested before the eruption and we find the manioc tubers in the beds that were left after harvest, as well as some re-planted stalks.
 

Excavating the manioc tubers left in the ground during harvest

Manioc Tubers

More Manioc

Me and My Manioc

Manioc Tubers

More Giant Manioc Tubers (These look similar in size and shapes to what we found in the Classic Period)

I have been given a much better appreciation for the amount of labor that went into the harvesting of
The very surprising part of this harvest was the difficulty in getting the plants out of  the ground. On many of the stalks it took four big, strong people pulling very hard to even get these to budge. We would rock the plant side to side to try to dislodge it from the earth packed around it and then continuing pulling. This took a great deal of effort, much more so than I had previously imagined.

Struggling to harvest the manioc

Transporting the Manioc

Then as we struggled to break the tubers off the roots, Alejandro's young son came up with his machete at made very quick work of removing the tubers. While the ancient Maya did not have metal machetes, they did have sharp obsidian and flint blades. (Side note: it is very common for young children in Central American rural areas to have machetes- you get used to seeing it after a while but for those of us raised in houses where children don't get to have knives, it can be somewhat startling at first.) 

Child with Machete- he was very helpful and much better at removing tubers than we were!

While we didn't find what we set out looking for, it was important for us to recognize how much effort would likely have been put into getting the large manioc plants of the Classic Period out of the ground. In addition to the excellent drainage provided by the large beds, it is possible that the beds might have also made harvesting somewhat easier. The other variable we must contend with in our analysis is that the soils of the Classic Period and those of today are very different. The Classic Period soil was made from weathered volcanic ash (called Tierra Blanca Joven soil) and was less compacted than what is available in the region today. This would have contributed to better manioc growth and likely a slightly easier harvest. 

Delicious sugary manioc dish

Manioc Plant Left-overs (Post-Harvest Pile). If you look closely you'll see a goat having a manioc-leaf snack!

 

Finally, one other area of cultural interest was the way in which Alejandro's wife fed us throughout the day. We would be in the middle of measuring tubers and she'd be there asking if I wanted her to make a chicken soup. In the end, she fed us more yucca (manioc) than we could possibly eat and proudly presented each of us with a glass of Coca Cola. I will never stop being impressed by the hospitality I find in Joya de Ceren.