2019 Blogs & Photos

Week 9 (March 18 – March 23) (Read the entire post)

Season Finale

The final week of the season saw all of the staff come together as a unit to finish the laboratory work and recording to properly close the field season. Diane completed the preliminary skeletal analysis of all of the deposits recovered from the various excavations. Adrian a...

Week 8 (March 11 – 17, 2019) (Read the entire post)

Baron Bliss Day

Week 8 marked a shift in what we have been doing for most of the field season. We moved from focusing on excavation to only doing laboratory work. The natural break between excavation and laboratory work was Sunday, March 10, which was Baron Bliss Day in Belize. Baron B...

Week 7 (March 4 – 10) (Read the entire post)

Disappearing snake

The week started off with a snake in the roof of Outhouse 3. For the second time this season, by the time the men got to the outhouse, the snake was gone. Earlier in the season, the disappearing snake had been seen in Outhouse 2, but we knew it was still around because ...

Week 6 (February 25 – March 3) (Read the entire post)

Make or break week

This was the “make or break” week of the field season, where everything needed to be opened and the end of the excavations needed to be in sight in preparation for the laboratory work that will occupy the final two weeks of the field season. Luckily, this was als...

Week 5 (February 18-24) (Read the entire post)

Puchituk West and Monterey

The fourth week of active research by the project has continued with excavations in both Puchituk West and the Monterey area. For the beginning of this week, we had a visitor on site, Dr. Rick Smith from Dartmouth, who was looking at our skeletal material with a...

Week 4 (February 11 – 17) (Read the entire post)

Week 3, the project finally reached “full force” with the addition of 3 more men on Tuesday (Jose, Gerardo, and Edwin). We now have 12 men engaged in excavations with the students and staff. Adrian has his own group that he transports back and forth to “West Puchituk” and Arlen transports t...

Week 3 (February 4 – 10, 2019) (Read the entire post)

The third week of the field season was the first one with any excavation, especially as we welcomed four new students to Caracol on January 31, and only received 4 additional men on Sunday, February 3. Accordingly, we began research in earnest on Monday, February 4 with half the crew going to local...

Weeks 1 and 2 (January 18 – February 3) (Read the entire post)

Starting up an archaeological field season at a remote location usually takes a while and is a slow drawn out process. In the case of Caracol it would not even be possible without the aid of the Institute of Archaeology and especially Brian Woodye. In order to get the season under way, the first...