Spring Break

I spent my Spring Break at the Middle American Research Institute (MARI) studying ancient pottery. I brought a couple of students with me. They seemed pleasantly unperturbed, and even excited, to be laboring through their holiday. Of course, you have to remember that to go to Daytona Beach for Spring Break, my students have to drive several hours north, where it's colder and less fun than here by the beach in south Florida. It goes without saying that my students are the best, so I was not surprised by their interest and enthusiasm.

MARI has really excellent collections. Even though I've examined a couple of them before, I didn't realize how great they are, or how extensive. They have quite a few highly significant type collections that will well repay study if you're interested in Maya or Central American ceramics. Our goal was to prepare for our ceramic analysis this summer in Nicaragua, where we hope to study materials from the northwestern corner of the country, near Honduras and El Salvador. For this purpose, the MARI collections could not have been better suited because they include significant material not only from Honduras and El Salvador but also from Costa Rica.

I cannot fail to mention that the staff were extremely hospitable and graciously answered a hundred annoying questions. I thank them sincerely.

We brought our new portable digital microscope with us and took it for a test drive. I bought a Dino-lite AM4515ZT because it seemed to have, at an affordable price, the resolution and magnification that would help us record and analyze ceramic pastes. I tried out a lower resolution, simpler, and cheaper model first, but it was disappointing. Fortunately, the new model came along just in time for the trip to New Orleans. In the near future, I will post some photos of sherd pastes to illustrate what it can do. I think it will be excellent for comparing pastes and analyzing temper sizes and shapes. It cost about $770. It offers polarized as well as regular light, automatic magnification recording, a good range of magnification (20-220x), and a 1.3 megapixel camera. We found that the use of polarized light was extremely helpful for enhancing the contrast between clay and temper. Note that to use magnification in excess of, say, 20 or 30x, you really need to have a stand for the instrument because no one can hold it steady enough to take clear microphotographs.

Now I need to find affordable digital image processing software for isolating the temper from the clay. The one that everyone seems to recommend (Image-Pro) costs more than $5500, which is beyond my budget for this project. Cheaper programs exist, but I don't know whether they will really do the job. Let me know if you're aware of something cheap that really works!

The best reason for visiting the collections at MARI is, of course, the New Orleans food. We ate at:

Antoine's on Monday,
Pascal Manale's on Tuesday
Court of the Two Sisters on Wednesday, and
Franky and Johnny's on Thursday.

Unbelievable food.  I gained several pounds in less than a week. If I lived there and ate like that every week, I'd be dead in a year, but what a way to go.

Maya Ceramic Texts

I wanted to post some more ceramic photographs to my Google webpage, but it just wouldn't work. Just an endless series of errors as the image files failed to upload. What a waste of time. I only managed to upload 5 of about 30 photos. "Google Sites" just isn't worth the time and effort, especially when the result is an ugly page. I'm going to try to post the same photos here on a static page. Wish me luck!

New Work at Tazumal, El Salvador

According to a brief note in El Mundo, Shione Shibata is directing new excavations at the major site of Tazumal in El Salvador. They have evidently found a substructure, possibly Early Classic in date, within one of the Classic period pyramids. Congratulations, Shione!

Trip Report

I'm writing this from my hotel room in Managua. Tomorrow morning I fly home. I've only been here about three weeks, but it was a good trip. I accomplished everything I hoped to and more. I spent the first day or so in Managua at the National Museum, and then went to Chinandega to study our collection and learn the new types we had defined. Then we took the bus from Managua to Tegucigalpa--long ride. Tegucigalpa looks like a nice city, surprisingly prosperous, but incredibly dangerous. Gangs rule the streets and the citizens are prisoners in their homes. The folks at IHAH were extremely gracious and allowed us extraordinary access to their collections. The first day, we studied the whole vessels in Tegucigalpa. We stayed at the Hotel Linda Vista: huge rooms, good A/C, nice owner, good breakfast.

The next day we drove up to Comayagua to visit the museum there, where they also have type collections from Yarumela and from the El Cajon project. Both sets of collections were very helpful, providing excellent comparative material related to our stuff. Comayagua is a dream, a lovely Colonial town nestled in a deep mountain valley, surrounded by dramatic mountains. The museum is very nice. It's in a nice Colonial building near the plaza and it has historic and ethnographic exhibits as well as archaeological ones. Here we are in the plaza next to the museum.


We stayed at the Hotel Casagrande, just around the corner from the museum. Very pretty! Even huger rooms with great A/C. Here's the exterior:


And the interior:


We next went to Los Naranjos by Lago Yojoa. The museum there is small but pretty. The site is lovely, the mounds are big, and they probably merit more study. I believe this is Mound 4:


There's a remarkable Olmec statue at the site. It was dredged from the hydroelectric canal in the 1960s. I don't know whether anyone ever found the site from which the statue came.


We returned to Tegucigalpa and took the bus to San Salvador. We picked a hotel named the Villa Florencia right next to the National Museum in the zona rosa. Rooms were a little small, but everything else was very nice and the location was perfect, not just for the museum but for restaurants and shopping. San Salvador is supposed to be very dangerous, plagued with gangs, but we could have been in Peoria. The Museum is wonderful, and everyone, starting with the Director and his staff, were wonderfully helpful and welcoming. Again, we were able to study both whole vessels and archaeological collections of sherds.

We got back on Wednesday, and I spent a day and half at the museum. Yesterday, we went out to the Cave of Cusirisna. It was a heck of a walk. Then I drove from Boaco to Chinandega, which takes exactly four hours in case you were wondering.

That's all for now. Wish me luck getting my flotation samples through Customs!