New Mexico State University anthropology students took part in the university’s first summer field school in Belize, joining a collaborative excavation at La Milpa, an ancient Maya site. The project included participation from the government of Belize’s Institute of Archaeology, the University of Texas at Austin, NMSU’s Department of Anthropology and several other universities.
“We all participated in joint excavations of an area in northwestern Belize,” said Thomas Hart, NMSU anthropology assistant professor. “This summer’s focus was on a site called La Milpa, a Maya archeological site near the borders of Mexico and Guatemala, which dates to around 900 AD. La Milpa is considered the third largest Maya site in Belize.”
La Milpa was once a significant urban center with as many as 50,000 inhabitants. Its Great Plaza is surrounded by temple-pyramids and ballcourts.
The field school brought together about 70 students and 30 faculty members. Ten NMSU students joined the effort, including two teaching assistants, two graduate students and six undergraduates.
“If you want to excavate in Mesoamerica, you have to get training in Mesoamerican archaeology, and it’s very difficult because Mexico and Guatemala don’t have a lot of field schools that are open to foreigners, whereas Belize does,” Hart said. “If you talk to archeologists in Mesoamerica, they’ve almost always excavated in Belize, so this was a good opportunity for our students.”
The group set up camp within the conservation area where La Milpa is located.
“They were fully immersed in it 24 hours a day,” Hart said. “There were animals that came through camp, you’d see howler monkeys and spider monkeys and all that sort of stuff. Since we were all together, the students also had the chance to meet other students from other field schools, meet other professors from other field schools and get a chance to learn other specialties.”
NMSU juniors Aaron Culver and Diva Zepeda worked on excavating cultural layers at La Milpa along with their peers.
“We were excavating according to what features we were looking for,” Culver said. “For example, we dug a unit with the intention of hitting some stairs. When we reached the top of these stairs, that was our unit one, and then the stairs themselves were unit two. We would take field notes and during the process, you’re also looking out for particular artifacts. Any dirt that you remove gets put into buckets and you take those buckets over to a sieve and sift through them looking for any small artifacts that you might have missed.”
Zepeda described adapting to new conditions during excavation work.
“I’m used to dry heat, and so it took me a while to get used to the humidity,” said Zepeda. “You have to excavate in the rain, so it was very interesting especially when the dirt gets muddy and it becomes clay. It’s very hard to screen it for artifacts.”
Hart noted connections between Maya culture and Southwest traditions: “You can see the ancient cultural connections in terms of items of Mesoamerican origin like chocolate and scarlet macaws and their feathers found at archaeological sites in the Southwest,” Hart said. “And given that many students here have connections to Mexico and Belize and Guatemala, it serves students on a personal level as well as an intellectual level.”
Although NMSU will not return immediately for another field school in Belize due to scheduling plans for future years, data collected by participants will be included in an upcoming report authored by David M. Hyde at Western Colorado University before being published more widely.
“For Aaron and Diva and the other students at the field school this wasn’t just a hands-on learning experience; it was also a research experience,” Hart said. “The students got to learn how you conduct field work; what they did contributes to production of new knowledge from the site and eventually makes its way up to peer-reviewed journals.”
