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| Learning in the Field |
| Team Belize |
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| Doug Kennett and the students of Team Belize gather prior to departure |
On June 3, 2005, students of the University of Oregon, along with Associate Professor Douglas Kennett, gathered in front of Condon Hall to pose for a picture. Three weeks later, the group reunited in Belize, at San Estevan, an ancient Mayan village, for a six-week archaeological field school.
San Estevan is the first collaboration between the UO and SUNY Albany. SUNY’s Robert Rosenswig and UO’s Kennett were working independently in Chiapas, Mexico, when they began discussing a collaboration focused on the emergence of Maya Civilization. Rosenswig and Kennett share a common archaeological interest in Mesoamerica, a region once home to the Toltecs, the Aztecs and the Mayans.
Rosenswig and his wife, Dr. Marilyn Masson, have been operating archaeology field schools in Belize for over seven years. In 2001, Rosenswig and Masson visited San Estevan and learned the site had been damaged by a road crew. After a bulldozer ransacked the site, lower sections of the mound were left uncovered.
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| Three weeks later, Lenore proudly displays the trip’s most valuable find, a war hammer |
“In most cases, we’re digging with a shovel through layers to get to the earliest archaeological record,” explains Kennett. “In this instance, the earliest record is exposed.” The damage done to San Estevan provides a unique opportunity, and this summer, a core group of archaeologists, including Kennett and Rosenwig, and thirty students—the dominant group hailing from the UO—traveled to Belize in hopes of identifying San Estevan’s earliest occupants. Of further interest to Kennett was how the villager’s lives were integrated into the larger political system of Mayan civilization. As an archaeologist, Kennett is interested in how social inequality among people evolves. In relation to San Estevan, Kennett hoped to understand when this evolution occurred and how it might have impacted the village’s earliest inhabitants.
For thirteen years, Kennett has focused his career on hunter/gatherer societies. Kennett’s first book, The Island Chumash: Behavioral Ecology of a Maritime Society, examines how environmental changes contributed to the political and social complexities of hunter/gatherer societies once inhabiting North America’s west coast. His second book is a forthcoming collaborative effort called Behavioral Ecology and the Transition to Agriculture, in which Kennett and others consider the consequences of early human’s transition to agriculture. This summer, Kennett traveled to San Estevan for the first time to understand how hunter/ gatherers became sedentary agricultural communities, and how this change contributed to “the emergence of societies where large numbers of people live in a single community and there is a significant social, economic and political distinction between individuals.”
Kennett notes similarities between “our situation now at a global scale and the ancient Mayan situation when forty state-level societies disintegrated.” These state-level societies had dense populations, social stratification, labor specialization, monumental works and written records. According to Kennett, when any social and political system is taxed, it falls apart. “What archaeologists contribute … what we find in the archaeology record,” says Kennett, “is there have been a lot of state-level societies like the one we live in today, and they all collapsed under similar conditions.” This often occurs when people learn how to work against their political and social system. “There can be devastation and death,” Kennett admits, “things we don’t like to talk about because it’s depressing, but we talk about it in class.”
In preparation for their experience at San Estevan, most students had taken a class with Kennett, either Introduction to Archaeology or World Archaeology. They also attended weekly tutorials to discuss aspects of field work. According to Kennett, archaeologists work in groups and, therefore, the discipline attracts students who are gregarious by nature. In addition to attracting those interested in humanity and history, archaeology appears to appeal to those with a love for detail and physical activity. At San Estevan, students listened to lectures and learned lab methodologies, but the majority of their time and energy was spent working on site. “As an archaeologist, you’re out in the field excavating like someone digging a ditch,” says Kennett. “It’s detailed work. Hard work.”
According to Kennett, San Estevan was the first time his students experienced the realities of field work: daily eight-hour excavations in eighty-degree weather, which seems hotter in Belize’s humid climate. At San Estevan, students lived and worked as archaeologists: loading and packing equipment, trekking between camp and ruins, preparing areas for excavation, taking photographs, and collecting data in an area populated by snakes, mosquitoes, and other bugs. “There can be unpleasant things about archaeology,” says Kennett. “Some people are afraid of snakes.”
Anna Mezger-Sieg, an anthropology major at the UO, prepared herself for San Estevan with a personal work-out regime. Rugby player Alexis Eudy felt she was prepared for strenuous field work. Eudy, a double major in archaeology and medieval studies, admitted to feeling nervous about the bugs but felt Kennett had properly briefed her on the importance of insect repellent and dressing appropriately for the conditions. When asked about particular archaeological goals at San Estevan, both Mezger-Sieg and Eudy confessed to wishing for the unlikely discovery of a burial chamber. They also hoped to find an archaic tool. Kennett believed that kind of find likely. “They’ll recover prehistoric tools and then record the relationships between these tools and more permanent site features like house floors, hearths and garbage dumps,” says Kennett.
Through mapping, digging, and recording, archaeologists reconstruct past human behaviors that help contemporary society understand their present and even their future. “Political and social systems disintegrate,” says Kennett. “But human beings don’t disappear. They’re innovative.”
In June, prior to departure for Belize, fourteen students gathered in front of Condon Hall and appeared optimistic. Mezger-Sieg, Eudy and others would return from San Estevan having connected with our human past. Thinking specifically about what she hoped to gain Mezger-Sieg said, “Perspective.” Eudy pondered the same question and then replied, “Myself.”
—AV
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1245 University of Oregon • Eugene, OR • 97403-1245
(541) 346.3950 • FAX (541) 346.3282 • alumnidev@cas.uoregon.edu
Copyright © 2005 University of Oregon
Updated November 12, 2005
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