June 10th

Well the weekend was fairly uneventful. The people who were only staying for two weeks left on Sunday, which brought a general bout of homesickness, but only for a little bit. The original plan had been to take the remaining people to the belize zoo, and spend the night in san Ignacio, and then go see a site the next day. Unfortunately, the planners failed to take into account the lack of vans that would be staying in Belize City to get the next round of people. So instead, we sat around all Sunday, and were so bored that by Monday we decided that instead of having a day off, we would go back into the field. We did go to mexico Sunday though, which included the long trek of driving a mile, and hopping into a little canoe to be paddled across the 20 foot stream to La Union. But they had corona and ceviche, and Mexican music, so all was well. Its funny how much difference that little border crossing made in changing the ambiance from Mennonite to blatantly Mexican. Lorry and Mary, two people from my group that left had bequeathed to me a bag of things they didn’t need, so I also spent the weekend making my cabin nice and comfy.
Yesterday I stayed in at camp to go on the site tour with the new people. A change from the last group, these people all seem to be from the west coast as opposed to the south. There is a huge difference in the feeling of the group. They are a lot more chill, but a little bit less in your face friendly. I miss our old group. Anyway, so I went with them to see the actual Blue Creek site core which they excavated about 6 years ago. Its all grown over, but after having read Toms (the director) book on it, and having worked on a hill that is slowly turning into a house, it was really impressive and interesting to see the site in person. Also it was nice to have a somewhat day off. I finished a book and sat in the hammock. Tom brought his 3 year old son back with him, Mikey. He thinks he owns the place and runs his trains around wherever he wants. I like him.
Today we went back out to Nojol Nah. The place is really starting to look good! Almost the whole top of the main structure is cleared. We have a small room on the east side with a doorway facing south, and a what appears to be a huge room spanning the rest of the top going west with two doorways in it. The floor is visible on all of it now, and its obvious now that the back wall fell off some time ago. The back of the house faces away from the inside of the courtyard and is very steep, so it makes sense that they build a tall wall there to keep people out, and that that wall would be one of the first things to collapse and fall down the hill with time. We finally cleared out the area where we found my huge amount of pottery. One of the trees has a foot and a half thick root going right through the area, obscuring what we think is a doorway facing the courtyard. Tomorrow the plan is to start digging in horizontally from the collapsed back wall forward to the doorway and under the floor to see if we find any caches, or better yet, the lineage head´s burial. The plaster floor has burn marks on it which indicate that they had a lot of ceremonies here, so the place was important even after it was abandoned. So… COME ON BODIES!