Xnoha

Each day I wake up around 5am and watch the sun rise from the palapa. It’s a great way to start the day. Breakfast is at 6, provided by our amazing cook, Margaret. We all leave base camp around 7, riding in the back of trucks. We drive to the site called Xnoha, which is probably at least 20 minutes away. Once we're there we park all the trucks and then split into our teams. There are four mini-sites, each with a team, excavating different things in different areas.

I'm on Hannah's team at 13-03. She is one of the newer staff members. She's super nice and I like working on her site. For the most part, every person on our team is kinda doing our own thing. It's a pretty small site -- just a little structure that we've just begun uncovering. So we all have our own designated area and task to work on. But at the same time, we're close enough to each other to still make conversation.

A lot of what we do is move dirt. Like I said, our site is a small structure. We started out the session with just the front and back walls and hallway partially exposed, but have uncovered a lot in two weeks. We extended the back wall and discovered that it goes out a lot farther than originally expected. It actually cut through our pathway to get into the site, so we had to start scaling the wall to get in at all.

I mostly was working on clearing the space in between the front wall and back wall. It should be the main room of the structure. However, we’ve been extremely deterred by a lot of tree stumps. There were three trees that grew in the center of the room and we worked to remove their stumps from out of our way. But the roots are really in there good and extend everywhere! They are also too thick to remove without the use of a chainsaw. So we have to remove all the dirt and rocks from around them before we can get them out. It’s a super tedious job after a while. But we succeeded in removing two out of the three stumps while I was there, so that was pretty satisfying.

I also worked a bit on uncovering a trash midden that we found behind the back wall. It was pretty interesting because the wall had two holes in the structure that most of the ceramic pieces are clustered around. Could it be an ancient Maya trash chute?? We don’t know for sure, but it’s a fun thought. And we found some cool things besides just pottery. There was a full mano, an obsidian blade, and even a piece of possible black jade! Pretty awesome. We mapped out the unit to show where everything was found and the next team there will probably go down farther into the ground to see if they find the same patterns.

During the day, we have water breaks at 10 and 2, although we can stop for water whenever we need to because we have to stay really hydrated. In the jungle it is SUPER hot and humid. The shade makes no real difference. At my site, every once in a while we'll get a breeze that is glorious. Also right after it rains or even during the rain sometimes it'll be cooler. Getting some of that moisture out of the air. But then the mosquitoes are killer. It's a constant battle between the heat and the bugs.

Lunch is at noon, and all the teams meet by the trucks to eat together – a meal packed by Margaret, usually consisting of chicken, rice, and beans. Then we start packing up and leaving our sites around 3, to ride out around 3:30. We head back to base camp, where we then fight over the showers before dinner.