I am off to Belize on Sunday!
So we arrived and took a long bus trip to San Ignacio yesterday. We are staying at Cahal Pech (translated to "place of ticks")on top of a giant hill with a spectacular 360 degree view. It is the oldest Maya site and was home to 20,000 people as early as 1500 BC. We are going for a tour of the site this afternoon!
Laurah and I rented bikes today and biked to campus only to find out that our professor was giving a lecture at our resort! Oh well, we are going to try to find him tomorrow.
We visited Cahal Pech on Tuesday and got a site tour from the archeologist who invited us to help with excavations. We spent most of the day exploring the site and all of the rooms. It was spectacular.
We went to Cave's Branch Rock Shelter yesterday which is an Early Classic site (1500 BC)that has multiple human burials. We hiked in with the archeologist and he gave us a tour of the surrounding caves in the area. We saw a scorpion spider in one of the caves it was so scary! On our hike back through the jungle we stopped and swam in a cave with headlamps it was a blast!
Spent the last two days in the basement of the health department that houses all of the artifacts from Belize. It was a little moldy but it was awesome. We measured teeth and bones all day and saw some amazing dental modification to several individuals upper teeth including jade inlays!
Laurah and I went to a new "lab" to measure more teeth yesterday. It is actually a house with no electricity or running water in the middle of a residential area that has all of the artifacts from a site that was excavated last summer. We found another individual with dental filing which was very cool! We are almost finished here and I think we are going to go to Guatemala on Sunday for the remainder of out trip. We are about 9 miles from the border and we really want to see Tikal.
L and I are off to Guatemala today by bus that should take about two hours on a dirt road! I have an uncomfortable sunburn and they like to sit four people per schoolbus seat so I am not looking forward to that. We are going to stay in Flores on the lake and then visit Tikal in the next few days. I am looking forward to doing some shopping for Emma!
We made it to Flores today and are staying in a beautiful hotel on the West side with a view of the lake. The bus was actually a minibus smaller than Momīs work van and somehow we managed to fit 18 adults and two children, luckily no farm animals! L and I did some preliminary window shopping for Em and found some beautiful skirts. We also met some architects that gave a slide show this evening on Mayan sites here.
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