Josh Feola

San Bartolo is a Maya site in the northeastern part of the Petén, the northern "panhandle" department of Guatemala. It was discovered in 2001 and has since been the site of a large-scale regional archaeological project. It has recently produced one hat, two Doctors of Archaeology, a handful of undergraduate theses (mine included), and more than a few amateur experts on Maya art and culture. It has been my home for the last six weeks.

The Petén is densely forested and when living in it one becomes accustomed to encountering two distinct types of landscape:



1. Jungle



2. Jungle with ruins

This is a subtle distinction that takes time to appreciate. It's sometimes difficult to comprehend there's anything for miles around even when you're standing at the foot of an enormous architectural complex. Though recent scientific breakthroughs (with direct connections to San Bartolo, incidentally) have made it possible for archaeological sites in the jungle to be remotely sensed from space, detecting Maya settlements in the Petén brush has been historically difficult and there are subsequently many un"discovered" (because it takes a licensed, typically non-local archaeologist to "discover"), unexcavated (though unfortunately not unlooted) sites pockmarking the jungle, visible only through a subtle rise in the earth and tiny dots of vertical inconsistency in the treeline.

San Bartolo is one of these pockmarks, about 1 km² consisting of four main architectural groups (including temples, palaces, ritual structures and administrative compounds), two large plazas, and a road running north-south for about half a kilometer between a ball-court and two residential groups. San Bartolo was discovered by chance and propelled to the forefront of Maya studies (and then thrust into the media limelight) because of its unique mural paintings:





The murals are significant because they index a fully articulated origin myth and cosmology (and attendant writing system) in place in the Maya lowlands at a date much earlier than was previously surmised for these cultural innovations (ca. 100 BC). If you're interested to learn more you can read my 80-page microtome on the subject (esp. Ch 2). If not you can enjoy my two favorite mural details. Above: The Maize God, having founded civilization at the world center and established the institution of kingship, dives into the underworld so that we (humans) might live, wrapped in this crazy abstract red-black-and-white death snake. Below: A slick jaguar hangs out on Flower Mountain (an iconographic motif with connections to Central Mexico, basically a topograph signifying the place of wild and beastly nature), where he snacks on an Oropendola (a weird-sounding, gold-tailed bird with its own Central Mexican connection: it was Montezuma's favorite).

As per Guatemalan law I can't reveal explicit details about the excavations I've done this season until these have been reported in full to the Institución de Antropología e Historia (IDAEH) at an annual Simposio in July, so instead I will dispassionately list the classes of artifact one might find in the course of excavating a lowland Maya site and maybe I will at a later date indicate what exactly I did and did not do in relation to these artifacts, which are at this writing only hypothetically related to San Bartolo:



A spindle whorl



Skulls



Polychrome pottery



Obsidian



Ceramic figurines



Ancient holes in the ground (not to be confused with Contemporary holes in the ground)



Benches



Bone jewelry



Mandibles



Friezes




Stelae. These last two are from Xultun, a large site to the southwest of San Bartolo. I was part of the first sustained mapping and excavation efforts at the site last year, and with full scale excavations set to commence next season, I may work up from the ground floor of Xultunian exploration. Which sounds kind of cool when I put it like that.



So I'm back in Antigua now, as evidenced by my favored motif of the omnipresent Volcán Agua, my constant reference point. It's an overcast morning and I'm slowly (2.5 hrs and counting) sipping away at a cappuccino at this super bougie cafe in the northwest corner of the Parque Central, which I was reduced to patronizing because my favorite wifi-friendly cafe (which is less bougie if no less "western", maybe the only difference is mean age of clientele?) doesn't have electricity and I needed to skype out to Beijing at 7am sharp for a job interview. Such is my life. I am of course and as always at a crossroads, but one that will hopefully be in my rearview within the next two weeks. Which way will I go? A note of suspense to tantalize my bewildered readership...

Regardless of what route I will take I am immeasurably satisfied with how the last few months have gone. I dug deep and got to the bones (yeah, puns) of the subject that I recently received a degree in, gained a visceral and spatial appreciation of time, made myriad little philosophical connections in a million different directions, became functionally fluent in Spanish, and had time to read a few good books. I realized how much I like archaeology. Archaeology is ethically useful because it encourages humans to think inclusively about humanity. Superficially (another pun) archaeology is a study of "the other," but so was anthropology until the ethical timebomb of regarding living, breathing, communicating humans as an "other" exploded and the discipline became "postmodern." The difference between anthropology and archaeology is that the people with whom the latter is concerned are neither living nor breathing. The similarity is that all people—past and present—communicate.


That said I'll terminate this particular communication. If you're going to be in Boston, Austin, Atlanta, Savannah, or San Antonio during the month of May, hit me up because we may cross paths. In the mean time, be good and make it a



-Josh

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I've been in San Bartolo for a week now, and as predicted the limited bandwidth and 3-hour daily ration of gas-driven electricity has limited my connectivity, for the better. Which means no heavy photo uploads any time soon, mostly just words.

The trip from Antigua to the Petén was long and filled with a good conversation and a mediocre nap. The conversation, which took place during the wait for my overnight bus out of Guatemala City to Flores, was with Marwin De León, an anthropologist from G.C. who 1) conducts forensic work on mass grave sites from the Guatemalan civil war in order to create a historical record for a period that is seldom discussed here, as far as I can tell, 2) works with indigenous communities in Colombia to determine more economically efficient and environmentally beneficial ways to conduct agricultural practices, and 3) is designing a television program aimed at increasing public awareness of Guatemalan heritage through illustrating the aims and practices of local anthropologists and archaeologists. I got his contact information and will soon be asking if he needs an assistant or can spare even one of his jobs.



If you remember last year's injunction you'll know that I can't talk about what I'm excavating. It will have to suffice to say that I am excavating, which is a step up from last year in my book, when I mostly just wrote notes in a book (not mine). Actually the mentality here is that the archaeologists do more desk work while hired ayudantes do the hard digging, but personally I like the physical aspect of the work. It engenders a visceral understanding of how things are superpositioned in the ground, makes the verticality of time felt by the body rather than coolly comprehended by the eye.



A note on archaeology and the body: Archaeological digging requires varying tools and levels of refinement. A shovel is rarely used to break ground: it is an extension of the torso, a poor tool for comprehending the subtleties of the buried past. Better to use a pick, an extension of the arm; a trowel, extension of the hand; or, in especially fine cases, a dental pick or razor, extensions of the finger and nail. (Machetes are fun but unless you're properly trained tend to be at best inefficient, at worst limb-hazardous.)


-Josh

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I was thinking about the past, as I'm prone to do, and reading last February's reflections on leaving for San Bartolo from Antigua, an action I'm due to repeat tomorrow. That was effectively my last update from Guatemala in 2008, and for good reason because the ensuing months were dense and difficult to decipher, much less write about, but it occurs to me that I owe some words about Copan and Tikal. So to employ a tricky timescale appropriate to an (amateur) archaeologist, I'll go back before moving forward. That is, I'll pay it forward with an overly packed entry because this time around I know enough to say I can't say when I'll have the opportunity to write again.



Copan is a Maya site in western Honduras, and one of that country's main generators of GDP. There are many things about Copan that I could write on at length, but, as my archaeological perspective is compromised by my art historical sensibility, I'll limit myself to the coolest-looking.



Copan's unique (among the Maya) artistic heritage is due in largest part to this man (above, in the bkg; and abover, in the foreground): Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil, sometimes referred to as "18 Rabbit" thanks to an early mistaken decipherment. UUK lived in the shadow of his father, which was considerable both because of the considerable territorial expansion accomplished by UUK's predecessor and the literal shadow cast by a monument his dad had symbolically erected on the top of large hill miles away from the site center. What UUK lacked in military prowess he more than made up for in aesthetic innovation, ushering in a completely new idiom of nearly 3-dimensional sculpture in the decades between his accession to the throne and his execution at the hands of neighboring rival site, Quirigua (see below), a glyphically-known act that effectively ended Copan's hegemonic control of the region.



Some glyphs on a weird monument



A two-headed turtle, half-living and half-dead, and appropriately enough bathed in light and shrouded in dark, respectively.



Copan's hieroglyphic stairway: the longest continual (albeit poorly preserved) Maya text that has yet been discovered







Some abstract gems from the Copan sculpture museum.



This building, called Rosalila, is another oddity in Maya archaeology: it was, like most Maya architecture, built over with successive phases of new temple construction, but was first covered with a comprehensive coating of plaster and then left entirely intact, ritually entombed within a new structure. Upon discovering it, archaeologists used razor blades to expose the vibrant colors beneath the plaster, then created a scale model in the Copan sculpture museum.





Some more strange sculptures, these from Quirigua, Copan's vassal turned conqueror. The last picture is K'ak Tiliw Chan Yopaat, the man who did UUK in and commemorated the deed by building the largest stela in the Maya area, complete with a text dipping into the deepest regions of mythic time (it records events said to have occurred billions of years ago).



A psychedelic view from the top of Tikal's Temple IV that my camera accidentally took back in 2007.

Tikal's history is too vast and hyped to do any justice to, and I'm already boring myself and probably you too, so here's some quick highlights:



Temple I



A long and particularly informative text



Worked bone



And the thing about time is it always terminates in today. So now after dipping into my and others' pasts I'll turn to the future. The future holds for me, as it did around this time last year, a trip into dense forest, but one I now at least partially know. If this meandering entry signifies anything, it's the fact that my conception of time is very cyclical, circular, though punctuated by linear leaps, tangential reasoning, a jumbled, semi-coherent geometry. Honestly I don't know why I think so much about the past, except that I like to recycle it into the future, which everyone does I guess but I attempt to do with a bit more self-consciousness. Maybe it's because I'm a reflective Cancer (though on the schizoid cusp with forward-thinking Leo). Nor can I explain my penchant for return, my seemingly infinite regress. My decision-making process is opaque to me, a palimpsest where will, coincidence, serendipity, fate, self-fulfilling prophecy, and a simultaneous desire for novelty and familiarity all coexist, coevolve, cancel each other out.

To avoid wasting many more words on the untranslatable (for me, at least) topic of my own cognitive functioning - and to beat one of my favorite tropes even deeper into the ground - I'll leave off with a contemporary and two ancient quotations that satisfactorily explain, in the way only oblique explanations can, why I'm doing what I'm doing at this moment in time:

2009 for the Cancer:

"You could be involved in some heavy research and digging on the job. Deep personal changes are ahead...Your attitude towards close relationships and partnering undergoes transformations. Depth of experience will be sought... Over the next few years, you will be ridding your life of superficiality in your close relationships. Lessons learned may not always be easy, but empowering in the end...Your biggest enemy now is resentment, which can act to eat away your confidence and healthy state of mind. In 2009, your eyes are opened to new experiences and belief systems...If you do get a chance to travel, which could come up quite unexpectedly, unusual, eye-opening experiences may be in store for you."


Dharmakīrti:

No one behind, no one ahead.
The path the ancients cleared has closed.
And the other path, everyone's path,
easy and wide, goes nowhere.
I am alone and find my way.


Bhartṛhari :

Why all these words and empty prattle?
Two worlds alone are worth a man's devotion.
The youth of beautiful women wearied by heavy breasts
And full of fresh wine's heady ardor for sport,
Or the forest...

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Slow few days. In my life stasis never lasts too long so it's a nice change.



Fried eggplant at Rum Bar, kind of an ex-pat spot opened by a Louisiana transplant who also makes good jambalaya and grows his own mint (hence the Mojito, a rare excursion into the mixed drink world for me). Also pictured: Paz's prose, my pale imitation



Went back to the Casa Herrera to link up with master cipher David Stuart and my friend/current housemate/El Zotz co-director Edwin Roman, who gave a talk on San Bartolo to a group of potential Casa donors.


My current digs:














-Josh

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Moving backward before I move forward. I moved back home. Reorganizing my life and mind. Clearly neither has been interesting enough to write about over the last three months but now that I have literally nothing to do I guess I'll try to fill in a rough sketch of what I did/what I'm doing/what I will do.



I finished my senior thesis on the murals of San Bartolo. This has been my primary vocation for the last year. Thinking about and ultimately writing a way too long tome on this subject, I won't bore you with details but you can bore yourself by reading the whole thing (without images, which are semi-classified, email me if you want to see anything specific) here: Ancient Art & Contemporary Agency.









The process of nerding out included presenting a short paper on the same topic at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November. This entailed a pre-Thanksgiving flight to San Francisco, unexpected engagement as panel chair, one mission mission, and numerous museum trips with Belize friend Emily Gable.









Saw SF Moma for the first time, checked out this ladder that's forever as well as an ad or two.





Then at the Asian Art Museum we saw this crazy exhibit on ancient grave goods from Afghanistan, heavily funded by National Geographic so somewhat sensationalized but actually worth the hype. Pretty much all that exists in terms of Bronze Age Afghanistani art, so if you're in the area you should check it out. No photos allowed unfortunately. Was able to flick this cool Zhang Daqian forgery and a strange collection of miniature bottles from Japan.







After that it was a maelstrom of writing over thxgvg break, then several weeks of presenting and tying up loose ends. Boring stuff. So to continue the theme I'll wrap up with some highlights from my most recent visit to the Boston MFA. Went with Alex Dow et al to check out this Assyrian exhibit, which was unfortunately already closed. Instead saw an insane exhibit of portraits by Yousuf Karsh, who photographed pretty much every significant figure of the first half of the 20th century. Wandered around some chambers of the museum I usually avoid, which was cool, I took a class on Baroque art this semester so I had a somewhat heightened appreciation for a lot of the stuff I usually visually tune out, though European art still kind of bores me. This painting of the 7th plague of Egypt (above) is insane though. The artist studied early drawings of French explorers in Egypt to reconstruct the architecture, weird re-appropriation of ancient art. Also this steam google maps is cool.



So I guess that's pretty much it. Oh yeah, and I graduated. It snowed for three days straight immediately before my departure from Boston, a nice sendoff I guess. For now I am laying low. Looking for something interesting to do in somewhere interesting to be, let me know if you are on the same page with that. I have NO PLANS and no loan payments for about six months.


In texas for now,
Josh

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Long silence from my end... I have been in the jungle for three weeks, and have avoided some great opportunities to catch you up on my various adventures in Honduras and Guate en route to this isolated tent burg, and now my computer has caught jungle rot and no longer functions! I'm trying to remedy the situation but the likelihood is that I won't be writing much until I'm back in the States, or if I do, my posts will be photo-less. In the mean time you can check out some of the photos I've taken since my last post here. If a picture is worth a thousand words these should be worth at least one overly verbose blog entry...

Talk to you later??

-Josh

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Spanish classes are wrapped up and I'm leaving tomorrow for the densely forested unknown. Here's what I've been doing for the last two weeks, the last month, the last few days, from my last day in Antigua.



Last weekend we went to Lago de Atitlan, a 1,000'-deep freshwater lake in the mountainous/volcanic Guatemalan highlands. The lake abides in a caldera formed by an ancient eruption, and has since human time observable been a site of great significance to the Maya who populated the region in the pre-Columbian era. There are actually archaeological sites beneath the water, but to observe these you must be high-altitude deep-water dive certified, a task for which I am doubly unqualified.

The purpose of the trip was to relax for the weekend, but I was keen to imbibe the distinct local Maya culture. There are over 20 Mayan groups living in Central America today, with distinct languages and cultural traditions. The villages around Atitlan are comprised of predominately Kaqchikel and Tzutujil Mayans. In a neat bit of colonial treachery, the Kaqchikels were enlisted by conquistadores at the dawn of Spanish conquest to defeat their then neighboring faction, the K'iche Mayans, before themselves falling victim to subjugation. Now the Kaqchikeles and Tzutujiles enjoy relative cultural autonomy, maintaining a more or less traditional way of life in the villages around the Lake, such as the one I visited, Santiago de Atitlan.



During my one full day in Santiago I took the opportunity to visit a Cofradía, a meeting hall where an interesting amalgamation of Catholicism and the shamanic Tzutujil religion is practiced. A few other students and I witnessed the blessing of an American philanthropist (and funder of excavations at San Bartolo). Two Tzutujil nahuals, or shamans, presided over the ceremony, one swinging incense around those to be blessed and the other (pictured above) playing guitar. In this picture the elder nahual has just inundated his guitar with incense from the Copal tree, floating a generous amount of the fragrant smoke into the cavity of his instrument. He played with his guitar nearly vertical and as he did a stream of smoke slowly trailed out around his hands and engulfed him in a pale, sun-inflected cloud. Cool image.



After the Cofradía we visited this guy, Maximon, a rather enigmatic Tzutujil god. Maximon is a local legend, and spends each year at a different house, making his annual trip during Semana Santa (the week at the end of Lent). On his way to his new home Maximon spends a few days at a Tzutujil temple adjacent to the Catholic church in the center of Santiago. The Tzutujil equate Maximon with Judas Iscariot, and when he is placed in his temple he is simultaneously viewed as hanging on his suicidal tree and jeering at the imposed religion of European others. Local legend has it that Maximon fights Jesus on Easter. When I saw him he was accompanied by a lit sculpture of Jesus in his sepulcher and two attendant nahuals. Maximon gets by on donations (such as those I paid just to visit him for a few minutes), and he puts the money to good use, "consuming" 40-60 eighths of liquor and a few packs of cigarettes a day (he smoked two cigarettes while I was there). I was told by our translator that while he's drunk he is taken advantage of by witches, who take away his curing power. However, when he wakes up to the holy nahuals he sobers up to his mistakes and regains his supernatural efficacy. Interesting guy.

To conclude our day we visited a Franciscan church where the Catholicism was a bit more clear cut. The main claim to fame of the church, however, was a fantastically intricate carved wooden altar, a towering masterpiece that took its craftsman eight years to complete. The iconography of the altar complicated a completely Catholic reading of its symbolism, as it featured such undeniably Maya adornments as the maize god and nahuals dressed as Maximon surrounding and ascending such expected imagery as Christ crucified and the mournful Mother.



My weekend concluded back in the unambiguously Catholic Antigua. There is an elaborate church procession every Sunday during Lent through the streets of town, featuring two marching bands, giant lit floats, and innumerable purple-robed Padres and altar boys. I managed to catch a lull in the motion long enough to capture this image of Jesus. He is attended on this float by lilacs, a tree, Greek columns and very Western angels, perhaps a no less conspicuous admixture of divergent cultural elements than what I saw in Santiago.



Now that I'm leaving Antigua, a quick word as to what exactly I've been doing in between all these disturbingly vacation-like side trips. Besides Spanish class, I've also been working in the laboratory that houses all of the artifacts unearthed from San Bartolo for two hours a day. As I've mentioned, San Bartolo possesses now-famous spectacularly preserved Maya murals dating to around 100 BC. Over half of the murals, however, exist in the state visible here, that is, in the form of over 9,000 (and counting) fragments of destroyed stucco wall. One of the main objectives of the archaeologists working here is to piece together, literally, the amazing imagery of the murals, using as a rough guide the art of both Preclassic maya predecessors and San Bartolo's iconographic descendants, notably illustrated manuscripts of the 16th century K'iche Mayan creation myth the Popol Vuh and the numerous lived Mayan religious and artistic traditions practiced today, one small part of which you have glimpsed here. In fact, the nahual guitarist pictured above has been to San Bartolo, making the 8-hour trip with full religious paraphernalia and a small orchestra of traditional instruments after hearing about the murals in 2004. My professor, William Saturno, described the ritual to me, which involved the burning of Copal and playing of guitar and drum. It moved him deeply, he says: "this is the first time these walls have heard this music in 2,000 years."


I know this is terribly long, but it's two weeks and many introspective days-worth of images and observations. The next week might slow my roll a bit, as I'll be on the road. Three nights in Copan Ruínas, Honduras, where I'll visit the country for the first time and see the artistically sophisticated Maya site of Copán. Then three days in Flores, Guatemala, where I'll revisit the most monumental Maya site, Tikal. After that, it's off to San Bartolo for two and a half months of mural-gazing, hard-digging, hammock-sleeping, no-running-water-but-somehow-constantly-internet-connected tent living. There will be much more to write.


-Josue

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