Proyecto Arqueológico Costa del Soconusco

I intend this blog to be mostly about the science – testing and refining our understanding of what processes created the archaeological record, especially in the estuary zone of far southern Chiapas. Before getting to the science, however, there’s a lot of project management stuff that has to get done, and I think a realistic account of the science has to include some record of the logistics, personnel, field conditions, and so on. Therefore, this and some subsequent entries will describe a bit of what we have faced in our work on what I am currently calling the “Proyecto Arqueológico Costa del Soconusco” (PACS).

I arrived at the Tapachula airport on Wednesday, December 7, 2011, and was met by Don Jorge Hernandez, my foreman in Chiapas. Don Jorge had brought Alejandro, the guy who had agreed to rent me his truck. We headed down the highway toward Cuauhtemoc, which was to be my home for the next several months.

I had arranged previously to rent Don Jorge's daughter's house. It was clean, but devoid of furnishings, so my first couple of days were devoted to trips into Tapachula, to buy things like chairs, shelves, beds, and other necessary items. I bought a lot of stuff at the WalMart, a practice that Don Jorge viewed dimly because of the comparatively high prices. For me, however, the time saving and convenience of finding everything in one place outweighed the added cost.

On Friday, December 9 I went out to the field for the first time. Don Jorge had had a crew working on clearing mounds on the ex-Rancho Soledad since mid-November, so access issues for this area were pretty well worked out and something like 10 mounds were cleared and ready for survey with the magnetometer. As of early December, the water level in this area was knee-high, so getting to the mounds required wading through deep water and mud and/or a canoe ride. The mounds themselves are above water, their summits being from one to maybe 10 meters elevation above water. The clearing operation had left large palms and other trees, which create good shade and overall pleasant working conditions.

Javier and Emanuel

On Friday, December 9, two students from Guatemala, Javier Estrada and Emanuel Von Serich, arrived at the Tapachula bus station. They had a week and a half or so before the Xmas holiday began and had accepted my invitation to come learn a little bit about the archaeology of the coastal swamps. I knew them from January, 2011, when they helped me on a magnetometer and GPR survey at Kaminaljuyu. Their experience was a perfect fit for the first couple of weeks on this project, when I would need people who could work on their own as I continued to wrestle with logistical issues. I was not disappointed, as they took over the magnetometer work and completed all of the cleared Rancho Soledad mounds before returning to Guatemala City on December 20.

Barbara Voorhies also came for a visit on Monday, December 12 and stayed for a couple of nights. Our project area is 50 Km or so southeast of the Acapetahua Estuary, where Barbara has been working since the early 1970s. Her main focus has been on the Archaic Period shell middens, which apparently are confined to the Acapetahua region and have not been found farther east, either in my study area or further east, in Guatemala. Barbara helped Javier and Emanuel with the mag survey, and demonstrated her affinity for early stuff by surface collecting a tecomate on RS-3, a site I had previously assumed to be exclusively Classic (tecomates -- neckless jars -- are Formative usually Early Formatice).  After her stay with us, Barbara headed to the Acapetahua area for some social activities with her friends there.

On December 13, while Javier and Emanuel were doing mag survey at RS-2, Don Jorge and I walked to the site of Bermudez (Ber-1) from RS-1. Although it is only 1.2 km straight line distance, the trail wound around a lot, making the actual distance much longer. Additionally, the water/mud was almost waist deep in places, making for extremely slow going

Tim, Paul, Evan, and Scott

My US archaeological crew chiefs started to arrive on Thursday, December 16, the first being Tim Garfin, a MA student from CSUN. Tim had a couple days to work with Javier and Emanuel on the mag, so some of the skills were passed on. On 17 December Tim and I used the new bridge/trail to Bermudez And took some footage for later viewing by my class. We also explored south of Ber-1 with Ramon Grajales, who led us to a small archaeological mound that we had not picked out on the LiDAR. It does appear on theLiDAR, however, so the lesson is that we were too conservative in picking out mounds. It is designated Ber-1a. Noteworthy too is the fact that we have found no false positives so far, so we have abundant proof of the usefulness of LiDAR to identify neArly 100% of archaeological remains in the swamp.

Evan Zufah (CSULB senior) and Paul Burger (CSULB MA student) arrived on December 20, giving me two days to get them oriented before leaving for a Xmas holiday with my family on San Cristobal de las Casas. I decided to minimize logistical headaches by putting them all on excavations during my absence. Tom started a test excavation at RS-23, while Paul and Evan started one at RS-3. Both excavations were placed over magnetic anomalies, which we hypothesized would represent firing features. The excavations continued, with some well justified expansions during Xmas week. Scott Bigney (recent CSUDH graduate) arrived on 28 December, and began helping with Tim's excavation.

Although excavation results are beyond my current purpose, it is worthwhile to note that both excavations produced abundant, clear evidence of the firing features that we hypothesized should exist at the sites. Another striking result is the very high sherd density encountered. This is especially striking because surface remains were almost absent; thus, surface collection would be a poor strategy for recovering samples from these sites.

Vehicles

The 1990 Ford Ranger that I rented from Alejandro worked, at least at first, but it provided insufficient transportation for 10 workers plus four archaeologists. Fortunately however, used trucks are fairly easy to find along the Guatemalan border, A little shopping turned up a 1993 Toyota that a mechanic assured me was in good shape, despite the 344k miles showing on the odometer. Interestingly, the truck had been sold to a wholesaler by Cerritos Nissan in 2007, and had about 13,000 miles added over the past few years in Mexico. It did require some new tires, brakes, and a few other minor things. The brakes, in particular, proved to be a continuing problem: despite the best efforts of the mechanic over the course of several days, the car still pulls slightly to the right, and the brake fluid drops over the course of several days.

The Ford Ranger has also gone through some rough times. The oil pressure gauge had been registering mostly 0 oil pressure from the beginning, and Alejandro had assured me it was just the gauge, and as long as you changed the oil every month it would run fine. At just around a month, the motor started making a horrible rattle – as if it had no oil in key areas. An oil change did stop the noise, but only for five days this time. The mechanic contradicted Alejandro’s assessment, and diagnosed the problem as a bad oil pump and delivery system. He pulled the motor, and in fact the pump and circulation system were completely plugged with melted plastic and metal – the car had been running with no oil circulation for weeks!  Miraculously, a new oil pump and a set of crankshaft bearings returned the motor to functional status.

Other miscellaneous problems with the vehicles have included flats, a starter motor rebuild for the Ford, and dead batteries. Additionally, in order to carry canoes and the 6-meter coring tubes, I had a rack (called a redila in Spanish) made for the Toyota. Beyond the considerable direct expense to the project of vehicle acquisition, modification, and maintenance is a considerable time cost; I calculate that I spent more than half of my time during the first four weeks of the project running back and forth to mechanics shops, auto parts stores, alignment shops, and so on.

Other vehicles important to the project include three canoes, one purchased by the project and two smaller ones rented. These are short, shallow-draft boats that can negotiate the sharp bends and submerged mangrove logs that sometimes block access to the sites. Finally, a cart pulled by a 30-year old horse named Gorrión serves for getting the canoe into some tight, muddy locations where we couldn’t take the trucks.

Getting around in the swamp

Eleven workers are currently employed on PACS. By far the biggest job they have to do involves clearing paths and canals through the swamp and then clearing the mounds of vegetation, so that we can run geophysical surveys, surface collections, and, test excavations. Machetes are by far the most useful tools for these tasks, but very large downed trees that sometimes block the canals require something bigger, namely a 4.5-horsepower chainsaw that we bought in Tapachula.

The week of January 15 the workers started staying out on one of the mounds, so that they wouldn’t lose time traveling to and from work. Fishing in the evenings yields an abundance of gar pike and mojarra. This week they plan to hunt an alligator. Food is plentiful, but after dark the swamp apparently becomes a bit creepy. Some of the workers claim to have heard a “man of the swamp” who is irritated at their presence. More concretely, they have heard a snarling feline at night, which could be a panther; although panthers are native to coastal southern Mesoamerica, a growing human population has pushed them to marginal areas, such as the swamp. Two of our archaeologists, Tim Garfin and Paul Burger are also planning to spend three nights camped out in the swamp this week.