this is an email i sent to my uncle. it covers a lot of what anyone might want to know about the site i worked on in guatemala. if some of it doesn't make sense in the context, i apologize. he just had a list of answers that i attempted to answer. the paragraphs seem to have been mushed together, but i have to run to work, so i apologize on not being able to fix that.
anyway, enjoy:
it was awesome. although the humidity was a killer. perma-sweat was something to get used to. the jungles were pretty cool though. although coffee trees seemed to be the most pervasive.
my spanish blew to begin with and was hopefully tolerable by the time i left. however, i can happily report that my listening comprehension dramatically improved. when i got there i kept having to ask people to repeat themselves. when i left, i still was, but less frequently. from what i've heard, guatemalans have a kinda accent that mexicans arent used to. although i guess mexicans speak faster. i met this woman that worked on the site through a local university (san carlos). we hung out and she helped me a lot with my spanish. the hardest thing for me is having enough time to think about the verb conjugation that you want. hablo vs hablaron, etc.
heh. my name. when i first went and started working with the natives, they thought i said my name was charlie, so they were calling me carlos. then somebody corrected them (i was kinda digging carlos), and yeah. trah-beese was what i got. speaking of v/b, there was this one woman from iowa who had no prior culture experiences with spanish-speaking peoples. she was getting pissed when she was telling people her last name and they kept saying "bowt" instead of vote. we had to calm her down and tell her that they can't really hear the difference. however, i still don't think she bought it.
unfortunately, i didnt learn many plants. we were mostly surrounded by coffee when we were working. however there were two trees around. actually three. one was banana. the other two, well, one was this palm-looking tree with maybe a 15 foot trunk and leaves about that long shooting up and out from that base. didnt catch the name, but i'm sure you've at least heard of it, cuz they use these huge-ass pods (about 3 - 4 feet long, a foot wide, and maybe 60 lbs) for its odiferous pleasantries (its relative, i guess. diana, the woman i told you about said its an acquired smell, but that it reminds her of family and holidays). sorry, i didnt catch its name. i left my address with diana so she can write me, but unfortunately i wasn't smooth enough to get hers. the other plant was a deciduous tree(are you more into plants or any flora?). it was maybe 50 feet tall with tear shaped leaves, more bulbous at the bottom (away from the stem) with veins running about 25 degrees from the main vein running down the middle pointing toward the end of the leaf. i apologize for these horrid descriptions, as you can guess i know very little botany jargon. anyway. this plant created fruit that looked a lot like giant pea pods. they grew a little longer than your hand, maybe 2 inches wide and a half to an inch thick with each pod about an inch long. the natives taught me to throw stick at them to knock them down. then you take them and peel them in half. the fruit inside was white and somewhat fuzzy. a little bit of flesh encompassed a seed that looked a lot like a weather-worn stone. didnt have much taste, but was a good snack. there were maybe 6 - 8 seeds per pod. i heard two names of this tree, one was wa - wa. the other i can't recollect. if i saw the name written down, i could probably have remembered it, but unfortunatley, i'm pretty sure those workers were illiterate.
new food: well. that wa - wa was new. what else. the main stuff that they prepared for us was usually beans and rice with maybe onions and tomatoes at our disposal. they hooked you up with a bunch of these tiny tortillas that were about 4 inches in diameter. i'd just slap everything i could find on it. i enjoyed all the food. however. there was this one salsa they called picante, and damn was she right. i've never tasted anything so hot. it had these light green peppers that were maybe a quarter-inch long making a thin greenish salsa. i put a healthy amount on my beans, rice and tortilla, which i paid for later. my mouth was burning for about an hour afterward. subsequent bouts with that picante had me putting maybe 3 drops of it on my tortilla. that was still enough to kick my ass. there wasnt really anything too new. it was just all sorts of combinations of rice, beans, tortillas, and the occasional meat. they had a lot of avacados, which i liked. (we had a native make all our meals. her name was dona maria. she spoke ketichal (sp?) as her first language, but spoke spanish fluently, although harder to understand than others)i only learned 3 words in katchikel (switched up the spelling) and i have no idea how to spell them, so i'll do it phonetically. hought shou-bim that means vamanos/let's go uk't bashute which means tu culo/ your ass. uk't is your that ' is some sort of glottal stop, which i couldn't master, but i yelled that at dona maria and she laughed her ass off, so i guess she got the meaning.
there were two sites. one was a 15 min walk from our base in town (chocola, with an accent on the a). that site had more people working on it and was the more interesting site when we arrived. i only worked on it one day. i'll get to the other site in a bit that i worked on. but this site was on a mound (there's mounds all around that town, the people i was working with only recently [last year] got permission from the gov't to excavate two sites and this year a third that they've yet to work on). anyway. at that site they found underground plumbing composed of rocks on presumably all 4 sides (lateral and top, bottom). they don't know if it was to get water in or water out, but i think right now they're leaning toward out. they dug up and followed it for about 50 feet where it starts going down the slope of the hill and diverges. they were following each tribuatry as we were leaving. very exciting. usually when digging we would only find pottery cherds about an inch to 4 inches long if you were lucky and an occasional piece of a worked obsidian blade, or this stuff called teschal which was pretty much the cement type stuff that they used in wall construction. but at that site found maybe 5 feet down in a little alcove was a nearly complete pot! it was maybe a bit larger than a basketball, nearly round with only a bit of the lip missing. it had two small ring handles at the top. only enough for two fingers. excited the hell outta everyone. some big-name ceramic person, margaret hatch, even came by only to say that she hadn't ever seen anything like it. the tiem we're working in is considered (as far as they know) to be preclassic mayan which means somewhere around 200 BC/2200 BP. its kinda that vague period where the olmec were there, then the maya were... who really knows whats going on?the site that i worked at was uneventful til about half way through. we found a wall that was about 7 rock layers deep. so they think that it was a terraced mound. they found a corner and have an ides of where at least on other might be. but we were the guatemalan site (vs. american site) so we had about a third of the people the other site did and couldn't get through as much dirt. but i think the head archaeologists came to be more excited about our find than the other place. in the site that we were digging they think it might have flattened out into a plaza and further down south was another possible terraced mound. the exciting thing about this is that chocola was now starting to look like this other site that was excavated back in the late 1800's. called takalik abaj. if you get national geographic, they actually did an article on it may 2004. this place also has those terraced mounds and cultural reminents of both the olmec and maya. they found more stelas there though. as opposed to our zero. but they think that the ones from chocola have been moved around. either to families around the area or to germany when they occupied the area. the place we ate as was actually an old coffee plantation/saw mill. one of the kids from san carlos is planning on making it into a museum and promote tourism in chocola. anyway. so with those terraced mounds and its location between two close rivers is seen in both takalik abaj and chocola. so they're now trying to figure out if these places were affiliated or rival nation-state type things.
surveying was done before i got there. mostly i just shook screens looking for the stuff i mentioned earlier: ceramics, obsidian, teshcal.
i didnt find anything too amazing. obsidian blade about 2 inches long. one of the guys i was with, a spanish teacher from denver found a ceramic bulb, about the size of a large lemon that had a nipple at the end and a hole (possibly for rattle purposes(?). but they think it was one leg for the base of a pot with either three or four legs. i saw something like it when i went to the popol vuh museum in guatemala city.another guy from philly who works in subsistence farming for people around the world found a ceramic head about the size of a large walnut. and also what was probably a mammoform (heh. boobs).
let's see. what i brought home. i got my mom a tejido... a weaving that i guess can be a table-runner or something, but she hung it up on the wall. i got my dad this cool mayan mask made from wood. its about a foot and a half tall by about 9 inches. its got a wooden maya-looking red face(with the mayan nose) and a bird as a headress. almost totem-ish. for my sister and megan, i got them each a white blouse with some funky designs in blue. its not what the natives wear with all sorts of purple, pink, orange, yellow, black, etc, but something that i think they'd actually wear.
as for you, i did get you coins, i think a complete set. and a few bills as well. the exchange rate is 1 dollar to roughly 8 quetzales, so i think i even got you a 20. as of yet, i'm still unpacked. i came back and some other guy at work went on vacation so i'm working 6 days a week for the next few weeks. but hopefully i'll get it together soon. they have the same denominations as we do. a dollar coin, 50, 25, 10, 5, 1. however it usually seemed that, at least in the city they dealt only in dollars. i rarely saw a 5 or 1 centavo piece.
the mosquitoes were crazy. they were a bright blue. something like the color you would imagine a poisonous dart frog to have if it was blue. they also seemed to float/hover more than mosquitoes up here. kinda just gently glide in to suck you dry. they were quick too. very hard to kill. you'd even get them in your hands, squish them, and they pop out and fly away when open your hands, leaving only an imprint of their legs. i guess the name for mosquito down there (i thought mosquito was already spanish for little fly) is zancur. they were making fun of us cuz you roll the R's at the end of a word, and we americans sucked at it. other weird bugs. there was this fly with a green sheen to it. looked like a fly with june-bug coloring that would hover just infront of you almost analyzing what you were. it rarely landed on you. as opposed to the mosquitoes which sucked the life out of the back of my arms, right above the elbow, i guess the part that is uncovered and hard to see when working. but i heard that those green fly things will lay eggs in you if they get the chance. although i also heard that they only do it in dead animals, so who knows? there were also killer caterpillars. well. only killer if you're a small child. otherwise it would make you deathly ill, vomiting, etc, which would make you want to die. they were these hairy (black and orange) things called pajarito/little bird because it has these projections at its sides that look like little wings. but if they bite you, i guess its hell. there were also less venomous caterpillars that were green with blue, almost metallic-looking spikes coming out of their backs. if those bit you it left a purple welt and was painful for about an hour. there were a bunch of black ones to but they "no pica", don't bite.
there were snakes, although i only saw one baby that was about 4 inches long. two black stripes and one yellow near its head, and the rest was red. they thought it was poisonous, but probably not as a baby, but who knows. they just moved it further into the jungle. there were these other snakes that we heard about. apparently before you sit down you clear a spot because of these snakes. apparently their favorite pasttime is to crawl up your ass if they get the chance. the only remedy is to sit in a platter of milk (i guess it could be worse). it seems like something that the natives would say just to scare us, but they were clearing a space every time before they sat down for lunch in the field.
i got some pictures i need to download.when i do so, maybe i'll send some your way.anyway. if you got more questions, let me. know. i'll be happy to answer.otherwise, i'm off to work. another 6 hrs or staring at a pool. i've been reading so much lately.
ok.
good day.
-travis
anyway, enjoy:
it was awesome. although the humidity was a killer. perma-sweat was something to get used to. the jungles were pretty cool though. although coffee trees seemed to be the most pervasive.
my spanish blew to begin with and was hopefully tolerable by the time i left. however, i can happily report that my listening comprehension dramatically improved. when i got there i kept having to ask people to repeat themselves. when i left, i still was, but less frequently. from what i've heard, guatemalans have a kinda accent that mexicans arent used to. although i guess mexicans speak faster. i met this woman that worked on the site through a local university (san carlos). we hung out and she helped me a lot with my spanish. the hardest thing for me is having enough time to think about the verb conjugation that you want. hablo vs hablaron, etc.
heh. my name. when i first went and started working with the natives, they thought i said my name was charlie, so they were calling me carlos. then somebody corrected them (i was kinda digging carlos), and yeah. trah-beese was what i got. speaking of v/b, there was this one woman from iowa who had no prior culture experiences with spanish-speaking peoples. she was getting pissed when she was telling people her last name and they kept saying "bowt" instead of vote. we had to calm her down and tell her that they can't really hear the difference. however, i still don't think she bought it.
unfortunately, i didnt learn many plants. we were mostly surrounded by coffee when we were working. however there were two trees around. actually three. one was banana. the other two, well, one was this palm-looking tree with maybe a 15 foot trunk and leaves about that long shooting up and out from that base. didnt catch the name, but i'm sure you've at least heard of it, cuz they use these huge-ass pods (about 3 - 4 feet long, a foot wide, and maybe 60 lbs) for its odiferous pleasantries (its relative, i guess. diana, the woman i told you about said its an acquired smell, but that it reminds her of family and holidays). sorry, i didnt catch its name. i left my address with diana so she can write me, but unfortunately i wasn't smooth enough to get hers. the other plant was a deciduous tree(are you more into plants or any flora?). it was maybe 50 feet tall with tear shaped leaves, more bulbous at the bottom (away from the stem) with veins running about 25 degrees from the main vein running down the middle pointing toward the end of the leaf. i apologize for these horrid descriptions, as you can guess i know very little botany jargon. anyway. this plant created fruit that looked a lot like giant pea pods. they grew a little longer than your hand, maybe 2 inches wide and a half to an inch thick with each pod about an inch long. the natives taught me to throw stick at them to knock them down. then you take them and peel them in half. the fruit inside was white and somewhat fuzzy. a little bit of flesh encompassed a seed that looked a lot like a weather-worn stone. didnt have much taste, but was a good snack. there were maybe 6 - 8 seeds per pod. i heard two names of this tree, one was wa - wa. the other i can't recollect. if i saw the name written down, i could probably have remembered it, but unfortunatley, i'm pretty sure those workers were illiterate.
new food: well. that wa - wa was new. what else. the main stuff that they prepared for us was usually beans and rice with maybe onions and tomatoes at our disposal. they hooked you up with a bunch of these tiny tortillas that were about 4 inches in diameter. i'd just slap everything i could find on it. i enjoyed all the food. however. there was this one salsa they called picante, and damn was she right. i've never tasted anything so hot. it had these light green peppers that were maybe a quarter-inch long making a thin greenish salsa. i put a healthy amount on my beans, rice and tortilla, which i paid for later. my mouth was burning for about an hour afterward. subsequent bouts with that picante had me putting maybe 3 drops of it on my tortilla. that was still enough to kick my ass. there wasnt really anything too new. it was just all sorts of combinations of rice, beans, tortillas, and the occasional meat. they had a lot of avacados, which i liked. (we had a native make all our meals. her name was dona maria. she spoke ketichal (sp?) as her first language, but spoke spanish fluently, although harder to understand than others)i only learned 3 words in katchikel (switched up the spelling) and i have no idea how to spell them, so i'll do it phonetically. hought shou-bim that means vamanos/let's go uk't bashute which means tu culo/ your ass. uk't is your that ' is some sort of glottal stop, which i couldn't master, but i yelled that at dona maria and she laughed her ass off, so i guess she got the meaning.
there were two sites. one was a 15 min walk from our base in town (chocola, with an accent on the a). that site had more people working on it and was the more interesting site when we arrived. i only worked on it one day. i'll get to the other site in a bit that i worked on. but this site was on a mound (there's mounds all around that town, the people i was working with only recently [last year] got permission from the gov't to excavate two sites and this year a third that they've yet to work on). anyway. at that site they found underground plumbing composed of rocks on presumably all 4 sides (lateral and top, bottom). they don't know if it was to get water in or water out, but i think right now they're leaning toward out. they dug up and followed it for about 50 feet where it starts going down the slope of the hill and diverges. they were following each tribuatry as we were leaving. very exciting. usually when digging we would only find pottery cherds about an inch to 4 inches long if you were lucky and an occasional piece of a worked obsidian blade, or this stuff called teschal which was pretty much the cement type stuff that they used in wall construction. but at that site found maybe 5 feet down in a little alcove was a nearly complete pot! it was maybe a bit larger than a basketball, nearly round with only a bit of the lip missing. it had two small ring handles at the top. only enough for two fingers. excited the hell outta everyone. some big-name ceramic person, margaret hatch, even came by only to say that she hadn't ever seen anything like it. the tiem we're working in is considered (as far as they know) to be preclassic mayan which means somewhere around 200 BC/2200 BP. its kinda that vague period where the olmec were there, then the maya were... who really knows whats going on?the site that i worked at was uneventful til about half way through. we found a wall that was about 7 rock layers deep. so they think that it was a terraced mound. they found a corner and have an ides of where at least on other might be. but we were the guatemalan site (vs. american site) so we had about a third of the people the other site did and couldn't get through as much dirt. but i think the head archaeologists came to be more excited about our find than the other place. in the site that we were digging they think it might have flattened out into a plaza and further down south was another possible terraced mound. the exciting thing about this is that chocola was now starting to look like this other site that was excavated back in the late 1800's. called takalik abaj. if you get national geographic, they actually did an article on it may 2004. this place also has those terraced mounds and cultural reminents of both the olmec and maya. they found more stelas there though. as opposed to our zero. but they think that the ones from chocola have been moved around. either to families around the area or to germany when they occupied the area. the place we ate as was actually an old coffee plantation/saw mill. one of the kids from san carlos is planning on making it into a museum and promote tourism in chocola. anyway. so with those terraced mounds and its location between two close rivers is seen in both takalik abaj and chocola. so they're now trying to figure out if these places were affiliated or rival nation-state type things.
surveying was done before i got there. mostly i just shook screens looking for the stuff i mentioned earlier: ceramics, obsidian, teshcal.
i didnt find anything too amazing. obsidian blade about 2 inches long. one of the guys i was with, a spanish teacher from denver found a ceramic bulb, about the size of a large lemon that had a nipple at the end and a hole (possibly for rattle purposes(?). but they think it was one leg for the base of a pot with either three or four legs. i saw something like it when i went to the popol vuh museum in guatemala city.another guy from philly who works in subsistence farming for people around the world found a ceramic head about the size of a large walnut. and also what was probably a mammoform (heh. boobs).
let's see. what i brought home. i got my mom a tejido... a weaving that i guess can be a table-runner or something, but she hung it up on the wall. i got my dad this cool mayan mask made from wood. its about a foot and a half tall by about 9 inches. its got a wooden maya-looking red face(with the mayan nose) and a bird as a headress. almost totem-ish. for my sister and megan, i got them each a white blouse with some funky designs in blue. its not what the natives wear with all sorts of purple, pink, orange, yellow, black, etc, but something that i think they'd actually wear.
as for you, i did get you coins, i think a complete set. and a few bills as well. the exchange rate is 1 dollar to roughly 8 quetzales, so i think i even got you a 20. as of yet, i'm still unpacked. i came back and some other guy at work went on vacation so i'm working 6 days a week for the next few weeks. but hopefully i'll get it together soon. they have the same denominations as we do. a dollar coin, 50, 25, 10, 5, 1. however it usually seemed that, at least in the city they dealt only in dollars. i rarely saw a 5 or 1 centavo piece.
the mosquitoes were crazy. they were a bright blue. something like the color you would imagine a poisonous dart frog to have if it was blue. they also seemed to float/hover more than mosquitoes up here. kinda just gently glide in to suck you dry. they were quick too. very hard to kill. you'd even get them in your hands, squish them, and they pop out and fly away when open your hands, leaving only an imprint of their legs. i guess the name for mosquito down there (i thought mosquito was already spanish for little fly) is zancur. they were making fun of us cuz you roll the R's at the end of a word, and we americans sucked at it. other weird bugs. there was this fly with a green sheen to it. looked like a fly with june-bug coloring that would hover just infront of you almost analyzing what you were. it rarely landed on you. as opposed to the mosquitoes which sucked the life out of the back of my arms, right above the elbow, i guess the part that is uncovered and hard to see when working. but i heard that those green fly things will lay eggs in you if they get the chance. although i also heard that they only do it in dead animals, so who knows? there were also killer caterpillars. well. only killer if you're a small child. otherwise it would make you deathly ill, vomiting, etc, which would make you want to die. they were these hairy (black and orange) things called pajarito/little bird because it has these projections at its sides that look like little wings. but if they bite you, i guess its hell. there were also less venomous caterpillars that were green with blue, almost metallic-looking spikes coming out of their backs. if those bit you it left a purple welt and was painful for about an hour. there were a bunch of black ones to but they "no pica", don't bite.
there were snakes, although i only saw one baby that was about 4 inches long. two black stripes and one yellow near its head, and the rest was red. they thought it was poisonous, but probably not as a baby, but who knows. they just moved it further into the jungle. there were these other snakes that we heard about. apparently before you sit down you clear a spot because of these snakes. apparently their favorite pasttime is to crawl up your ass if they get the chance. the only remedy is to sit in a platter of milk (i guess it could be worse). it seems like something that the natives would say just to scare us, but they were clearing a space every time before they sat down for lunch in the field.
i got some pictures i need to download.when i do so, maybe i'll send some your way.anyway. if you got more questions, let me. know. i'll be happy to answer.otherwise, i'm off to work. another 6 hrs or staring at a pool. i've been reading so much lately.
ok.
good day.
-travis
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home