FOR THOSE OF YOU....

Some of you have expressed a desire to know more about exactly what it is my work is about. Those of you who know or couldn't care less should ignore this post.... Those of you who are interested, read on! Below, I've pasted an informal introduction to my studies that I wrote as part of one of my current attempts to get some money. It is a VERY non-academic introduction to how I think about things. Those who want to know more about the pure archaeology of it all, just skip to the post below. I'm trying to wrestle some pictures into a posting I've already written about more "daily life" fieldwork stuff, but for now you can get the text under the heading "La Patrona".

In 1529, Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain, one of 19 Franciscan missionaries. During the following sixty years, he learned Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, he taught indigenous men Spanish and Latin. He taught them to read and write, he taught catechism, he trained them to be priests, and all around, he saw what he believed to be the complete destruction of the pre-Hispanic world. This was not an unreasonable assumption. Modern estimates place the indigenous death toll at 90% of the population in the first 100 years after the arrival of Cortes (Knight 2002). This was devastation on an unimaginable level for both the indigenous population and Europeans[1]. How could any culture survive such ruin?

Sahagún was an unusual man. He was not only a missionary, he was a humanist, a scholar, and he was, many argue, the first anthropologist to set foot in the New World. The destruction he witnessed seems to have worried him. He was, of course, in favor of converting the Indians to Christianity, but he wanted to document the world that had existed prior to the Spanish arrival before it completely and irrevocably disappeared. He did so in the form of a twelve volume encyclopedia known today as the Florentine Codex. The Codex contains descriptions of everything in the Aztec world: history; a complete sketch of their deities; Aztec social structure; their catalogue of the natural world. He wrote his encyclopedia in both Spanish and Nahuatl with the help of native informants who had lived in pre-conquest times. His informants most likely created the lavish illustrations accompanying the text. It is an incredible piece of scholarship, by any standard, and today it provides us with our most reliable glimpse of pre-conquest Mexico.

Early in the summer of 2004, I was in Central Mexico visiting a project I had no intention of becoming a part of. I spent the first two years of my graduate education determined to study the archaeology of ethnic identity in Oaxaca. On my way to Oaxaca and the project I thought I was to spend the next few years with, I stopped in Puebla to introduce myself to the then-director of a new project studying the history, archaeology, and anthropology of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla. Dr. Harold Juli was leading a field school of students from the University of the Americas in Cholula, Mexico. Their subject was ethnoarchaeology and ethnology, in preparation for excavations of the Hacienda that Dr. Juli had scheduled for the following summer. I sat down and spoke with Dr. Juli and his students, largely with the intention of making connections in the small but burgeoning field of Mexican historical archaeology.

The students had been collecting oral histories and conducting basic interviews in the descendant community of La Soledad Morelos. Out of curiosity, I asked them what the people of La Soledad Morelos had to say about animals. My specialty is the analysis of animal bones, and, regardless of my interest in a project, this is a question I always ask. The students started giving me the expected list of animals that the people of La Soledad Morelos recognize as part of their world, ranging from European-introduced domesticates such as cow and goat to the native domesticates of turkey and dog. One of the students laughed and said, “Oh, and then there are the animals that don’t really exist!” The rest of the students laughed dismissively, but my curiosity was piqued.

“Animals that don’t exist?” I asked. The student nodded and proceeded to offer a description of a two-headed snake, completely unknown to modern science. The other students laughed and supported her with their own accounts of this mysterious two-headed snake. I was fascinated. The description could have been taken, word for word, from Sahagún’s volume on natural history in which he describes an Aztec “two-headed snake.”

I had a new dissertation project. Since 2004, I have assumed directorship of The Acocotla Project with the assistance and support of the faculty and students of the University of the Americas. My dissertation examines the maintenance of pre-Columbian identities through foodways (the practices surrounding the acquisition, preparation, distribution, and consumption of food). Foodways is not just about food, but about all the “stuff” that comes with it. Imagine any festive, celebratory meal. You have to plan a menu appropriate to the occasion, you have to get the food, you have to prepare it (for which you need equipment), you have to serve it (which requires more equipment). Serving food requires deciding who among your guests receives what portion. After you’ve decided on the food but before your guest arrive, you have to decide what to wear and how to set the table (and the tone) for the meal to come. Every single step in this unconsciously complex process is culturally-loaded. Decisions made are based on social identity. Standing at the head of the Thanksgiving table, you have to decide who will receive white meat and who gets dark. The answer to this dilemma isn’t obvious to those outside your cultural parameters. The material manifestations of this process are the basis for my study.

My excavations at the Hacienda Acocotla are producing large quantities of food remains in the form of bones and charred plant remains, as well as the vessels used to prepare and serve the meals. As recently as the end of the 19th century, women prepared food using traditional, pre-Columbian stone tools. The material remains indicate that the pre-conquest corn tortilla accompanied meat from European-introduced domesticates. Families sat down in front of the calpanaria to share a meal served on ceramics painted brightly in the Spanish tradition but produced locally. The women of the family made themselves pretty with brightly colored glass beads and brass and copper jewelry. The men proudly wore pre-Columbian-style ear spools that they had made themselves out of a reworked piece of brick. The undoubtedly lively conversation that passed among the diners was in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs.

The grandchildren and great grandchildren of those diners sit down to similar meals today. Superficial things have changed. Spanish is the only language spoken, and the ear spools are absent. In spite of this disconnect, much is still the same. Today, it is Gaudencio’s birthday, and everyone in the village is invited to eat. The women of his family spend two days preparing a delicious mole using exclusively pre-Columbian ingredients. I ask them about the ingredients. They turn their noses up when I ask if they use the European-introduced chicken. Laughing, they gently explain to the ignorant gringa that chicken is awful in mole; the only meat ingredient for a good mole is turkey. We sit in the courtyard together around a modern “reproduction” of the ceramic vats (or cazuelas) that I have excavated at more than one pre-conquest site. While we sip our beer, we toss chopped chiles and turkey into the mole simmering over an open fire. We watch while the most accomplished cooks prepare an indigo-colored tortilla out of blue corn. Though many Mexicans claim that tortilla machines liberated the woman of Mexico, the women of La Soledad Morelos are rightly proud of their hand-made tortillas.

Eventually, after hours of preparation, the mole is ready and the party begins. The women’s jewelry is indistinguishable from what we find archaeologically. The dishes we eat off of, while clearly modern versions, owe their design to those I find in my excavations at the Hacienda. The food we are served owes nothing to European heritage and is drawn exclusively from pre-Columbian ingredients. When it comes time for me to take my leave, there is a rush. The hostess must prepare the ētecate, a Nahuatl “doggie bag.” No guest may leave without a portion of the food from any party in La Soledad Morelos, and though nobody speaks Nahuatl, there is no known Spanish translation of this word.

This is the basis of my dissertation. These unspoken continuities intrigue me. Today, the people of La Soledad Morelos identify as mestizo rather than indigenous because it is fashionable. To be indigenous in Mexico today is to belong to the lowest class. Yet, with the exception of the most blatant material items, they maintain indigenous practices, identifiable in the archaeological and ethnohistoric records, from times pre-dating the Spanish Conquest. The label they apply to themselves is important, but so is the material reality upon which they construct the label. That material foundation is what I study, from the founding of the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla in 1577 through the present day.

[1] For comparison, the highest estimates for death due to the infamous European Black Plague are, at their highest, 30% Ziegler, P. 1970. The black death. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin Books..

LA PATRONA
March 13, 2007

In memoriam….

O.K., so clearly, I am not good at this whole “regular updates” thing. Those of you who feel miffed because I don’t write more often can feel good about the fact that it clearly isn’t personal!

But this time, I have REALLY good excuses! The happy news from Mexico at the moment is that I have just finished eight weeks of excavations (and turned up lots of cool stuff!). More on that soon….

The not happy news is that my project director passed away a few weeks ago rather suddenly. He was diagnosed with cancer last summer, but seemed to be responding well to treatment. He and his family, and the doctors for that matter, were feeling positive and cheerful. He decided that he was well enough to teach a few courses at Connecticut College this spring, and he even gave the first day of lectures. Unfortunately, it turned out that his radiation treatments were just making the spread of his tumors undetectable. While he was undergoing treatment, they ran rampant and spread throughout his body. Two days after giving his first lecture, he was admitted to the hospital. Twenty-four hours after that, I got the message from his son that he wasn’t expected to survive the weekend. He hung on for a week, and he got to spend a little more time with his family and his new grandson and to say goodbye.

Leaving aside the whole personal grieving from a distance, worrying about his wife, not being there to support the family or say goodbye awfulness of it all, it has made for a sad and lonely time here in the field. I’ve been on my own here for quite awhile, but I always knew I could pick up the phone and discuss the project with Harold and ask his advice. All of the sudden, it’s all me. Every decision about the excavations is mine and mine alone. In archaeology, there is rarely a right or wrong answer to any decision. Mostly, we just have to weigh all the options and try and decide what fits best within time and money constraints. In my experience, the best way to do this is to kick around ideas with lots of people and get everybody’s view on what will or won’t work.

Even though I had ten employees, Mexico is a very hierarchical kind of place, and nobody really wanted to leap in and discuss options. It didn’t matter how much I encouraged group input, asking them what they thought just caused a whole lot of discomfort. Everybody would look at each other and shift from one foot to the other. Finally, someone in the group would say, “Oh, whatever you think is best, patrona.”

So here I am. La Patrona.

Somehow, I muddled through. If I made any wrong decisions (which I won’t know until I’ve finished the artifact analysis), it is probably for the best. Any decision that would have resulted in more artifacts would have been an issue. As it currently stands, I can’t get to my couch due to the few hundred 5 gallon bags full of artifacts and soil samples in my living room. They are full of lots of fun stuff. Ceramics and bones and stone tools and little figurines. I’m certain that Harold is happy we managed to keep digging and is as excited as I am by all the interesting things we found!

So, to recap….

Eight weeks ago, after returning from Christmas in the states, I began excavations. I hired a field assistant, Su Lin, after my original field assistant, Adriana, quit the night before we were supposed to start digging. Some might view this as another negative chapter in the drama that has plagued this project for the last year, but I didn’t find it to be a problem at all. In fact, I think it was rather a blessing! Last summer, my friend Kim, who has a way with words, nicknamed her “Twisty Knickers.” I remain uncertain if this was due to the fact that after meeting with my “assistant” I would come home with my knickers in a twist, or due to the fact that my assistant’s general attitude was indicative of a certain level of knotting in her undergarments. Regardless, the change in personnel made for a much smoother couple of months!

We began excavations with only six workers rather than a full complement of eight as we intended, but we were happy to take what we could get and finally start! Once word spread in the village, our numbers slowly increased. After telling our workers that we needed more people to help, they showed up at the beginning of the second week with a half dozen children between the ages of 8 and 13. The youngest of the children were actually the local animal herders, and so brought with them approximately 6 cows, 15 goats, a dozen sheep, a donkey and assorted dogs. To keep things exciting in the dog department, one of my workers also arrived daily with all 10 of his dogs.

My days in early childhood education came flooding back as I spent the first few days of that week trying to deal with the fact that I was now not just the patrona of The Acocotla Project but also, apparently, the patrona of The Acocotla Day Care and Petting Zoo (Central Mexican’s first Hacienda Day Care!). After breaking up the umpteenth doggie battle and shooing the donkey out of one of the excavation units (again!), I decided enough was enough. I took the spokesman of the workers aside and explained that if the Mexican Government or funding agencies found out I was employing children, I was going to have a problem, and that my patron could visit at any time and there would be trouble!

Making yourself the subject of somebody else’s authority is always a good negotiating tactic in rural Mexico. Everybody understands having to answer to SOMEBODY in a village like the one I work in, and NOBODY wants to come to the notice of the government for any reason at all! My problem with our demographics was immediately understood on these terms, and my foreman apologized and promised to find some older workers for the next day.

Slowly our workforce built up, bit by bit, as word made its way around the adult population of the village that there was a cash salary to be made out at the Hacienda. I had soon exceeded my complement of workers (all adults this time), and things were truly under way!

Over the course of the eight weeks, we excavated five rooms in the workers quarters and an enormous midden (archaeology speak for a pile of trash!). In the summer of 2005, we excavated a small test unit, just a one meter by one meter, and found what we thought must be a midden. This year, our plan was to expand that area and get as much as we could out of it. For a historical archaeologist, the only thing better than a midden is an outhouse (awesome preservation due to moisture and the place where people hid all the trash they didn’t want anybody to know about!). When planning it this year, I thought to myself, “Well, I’ll just go ahead and dig a HUGE area to make sure we get the whole midden,” and I figured it would be quick work. HA HA. Famous last archaeological words!

We opened up what I thought was a big area, 5 meters by 2 meters, with last year’s little test pit right in the center. When we were down below the surface by about a meter, I realized that we were still smack in the center of what was turning out to be a VERY BIG midden. We dug and dug and dug and dug for weeks and weeks and weeks. Literally. I put trenches off it in all directions trying to find the edge. After a week of trenches, I still didn’t have the edge of the midden, but I did have a building we didn’t know existed. To be accurate, I had approximately 12 inches by 12 inches of collapsed wall in the very end and very bottom of a trench. Peeking out from underneath it was the tiniest bit of plaster floor.

So again we dug and dug and dug and dug… We reached the end of the collapsed wall, feeling very good about things, the week before we had to start filling the excavations up again. As we cleaned the edge, one of the workers said, “How come there are some bricks here?”

I looked down into the pit, and sure enough, there at the bottom, was the edge of a beautifully laid brick floor. I took a deep breath.

And we dug and dug and dug some more….

By the end of the excavations, we had uncovered everything. But don’t ask me what it is just yet! I’m not prepared to guess until I’ve had some time in the lab with the artifacts.

Over the last week, as I’ve talked to a few people over the phone, a number of people have said to me, “You’re done? But what are you going to do now!?!? I thought you were there to dig!”

Very simply, the bulk of my work is only now just beginning. Digging is the quick, easy part of things. As a general rule, for every one day we spend digging in the field, an archaeologist needs 6 days in the laboratory to process and analyze the artifacts. Since Mexico prohibits my bringing artifacts back to the States, all that work has to be done here. I have a lab set up in my house, I’ve programmed a database, and now I’m beginning the “important” work. When you are out in the field digging, all sorts of wild interpretations run wild through your head. You are out in the sun in a high altitude desert, where you spend eight hours a day five days a week doing heavy physical labor. There is no shade, you’ve run out of water, it is 95 degrees, and you haven’t had time to sleep more than four hours a night since excavations began. Your brain starts writing all sorts of stories. It is the really fun part of archaeological fieldwork (and no, I’m not being sarcastic! It really is a blast!). But the truth is, until you get back to the lab, plug all the info into a database, and run a bunch of statistical analyses, those stories are nothing but semi-delusional, water-deprived fantasies.

So, keep tuning in to find out what it was I dug! I’ll let y’all know as soon as I decide myself!

And that is it for now. I think it is time for bed here. Next time, check in for pics of my favorite artifacts (like this one!)!