Archaeology and Architecture

Friday, October 16, 2009 Mound 54, almost completely liberated (Cuevas 1970)

During our survey, we detected that all the buildings are quadrangular. We also found a couple of structures that allowed us to compare the construction techniques with the ones found by Cuevas. Preliminary results seem to indicate that this tradition was started during the Formative and continued through the Classic. Apart from that, we have […]

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Things are Moving Really Fast

Friday, October 9, 2009 Rodolfo Parra analyzing with students

Analysis is moving fast. With Universidad Veracruzana’s students help, Rodolfo Parra has already analyzed 40% of the ground stone artifacts collected during the survey. Among the collection we have manos and metates, dishes, and hammers. Meanwhile, in the camp-lab Eli, Ramiro & Natalia continue the ceramic analysis. So far, materials indicates an occupation dating from […]

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Traveling Ground Stone

Friday, October 2, 2009 Full loaded truck with ground stone

After receiving our transport permits from the Consejo de Arqueología (which is a board of 11 eminent archaeologists who regulate the practice of our discipline in Mexico), we embarked on the difficult task of moving all the ground stone we collected during the survey. We loaded 442 tagged bags and 10 individual fragments in two […]

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Trying to Put Everything Together

Thursday, September 24, 2009 High-school student Luis Manuel learning how to draw sherds from Ely.

After finishing the preliminary classification of artifacts according to their industry and raw material, we are genuinely scared about the amount of pieces left for analysis!! The process for ceramics is simple but very systematic: we open the bags, separate the sherds in types previously defined by Dr. Annick Daneels for the region, then we […]

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The Analysis Begins

Wednesday, September 16, 2009 In order to register and count the materials correctly, we separate them in different categories.

This past week, we began the analysis of the archaeological materials collected during the survey. Firstly, we divided the materials according to six different categories: Ceramics, that will be analyzed by Natalia; ground stones, in charge of Rodolfo Parra; flaked stone and figurines, which will be classified by Jonathan; special artifacts, analyzed by Natalia and […]

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