Greetings from Mexico!
The days keep flying by here with pretty much each the same as the last. I’m working 7 days a week on my data collection, although on the weekends I do let myself take more and longer breaks than during the week. The highlights of my weeks are the 2 trips I get to make to Etzatlan each week to use the internet and buy groceries and the 2 phone calls I make to my husband each week. Those help keep me connected with home and also give me something to look forward to every couple of days. Life here has really gotten into a routine for now, which means I can focus on my work more but that I don’t necessarily have anything new and exciting to write about. I did get a request this week for more info about the ceramics I’m working with, so I’ll share a bit about that this time.
My current project is to collect some very detailed information about each of the thousands of sherds that I’ve selected randomly to be a part of my study. The sherds I’m working with now are the ones that I excavated (or actually that my workers excavated) back in 2003 and 2004. The mostly date from two pretty distinct periods—either from the time that the site was originally built and occupied or from a much later reoccupation. The site was originally occupied in the first few centuries AD and then was reoccupied roughly 1000 years later. Most of the ceramics are very quickly identified as being from one time period or the other since the early folks almost always used white clays for their ceramics and the later folks almost always used red clays for theirs. For each sherd (broken piece of pottery) that I’m studying, I have dozens of pieces of information that I collect ranging from things like the pottery type (a name given to that style of ceramic by the archaeologists) to any damage done to the sherd to the sherd’s weight and dimensions. This is much more detailed than what we would normally do with the sherds, which is mostly just to divide by type and then count how many of each type we have for each area of excavation.
This week’s photos are of one of the ceramic vessels we found in our excavations. It was found in front of one of the platforms mixed in with a lot of stuff that had collapsed off the top of the platform over the centuries. Usually we do not find all the sherds from the ancient pots—in fact, we may only have one or a handful of sherds to represent a small portion of the whole thing. This time, though, we have nearly the whole pot. The type name for this particular pot is Huistla, which is the name of an archaeological site in the region. The sort of pot is is known as a molcajete (mole- cah-HAY-tay). Like this one, most of the Huistla molcajetes we find have lots of incisions inside them. You can see them in the photo as stripes inside the bowl. These bowls often have 3 legs to support them, as well, but this one is just a simple bowl. The theory is that these were used for food preparation tasks (like crushing peppers) like modern molcajetes are.
This is no ordinary molcajete, though. The molcajetes date to the reoccupation of the site, which would have already been collapsed ruins by the time the new occupants arrived. This molcajete was probably an offering that was buried in the collapsed material by the new residents of the site. It was pretty common practice to bury whole pots underneath or near a building as a sort of offering. It was also common to do what archaeologists refer to as “killing” the pots that are in the offering. You can see that this likely happened to this pot because it is complete (though broken) with a “kill hole” in the base where it would have been struck to cause the damage. All this evidence added together makes me believe that this bowl was placed in the ground and intentionally broken as an offering by people who came to occupy the site centuries after it was originally occupied and abandoned. Most of the sherds included in my work are much smaller than the pieces that this bowl is in. The smallest piece of the bowl, which you can see on the left side of it in the overhead shot, is pretty typical of the size of the sherds that I usually see in my work.