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In Mexico, it’s pretty straightforward. “Oh, my cousin on my father’s side is a dentist. And he will take good care of you.” The referencer in the States is more like “Well, I’ve been going to doctor so-and-so for years and I’m happy with him.” Now, neither of these references actually says that the dentist or doctor in question has any idea what he is doing… just that he is known and will probably recognize the name of the person who gave you the reference.

It often comes down to trail and error. Try the dentist and hope that he doesn’t charge you an outrageous sum, hope that he does everything that needs doing without causing greater problems and hope that he can fit you into his busy schedule. If the first one doesn’t work out, you look for another one until you find one that fits with your needs and expectations.

You do essentially the same when looking for a new supermarket. Try it out and see how the prices compare, how fresh is the fruit and the meat, is there good customer service and sufficient parking. All the little things that add up to finding a service supplier that you can live with.

It’s always a little harder doing this in a foreign country with the language differences, cultural differences and the differences of how things are done. But the route is more or less the same. Similar decisions are made when looking for an h’men or shaman.
Now what I mean by that term is not a curandero or a herbatero… people who treat, and often cure, with herbs and plants. It’s not a witchdoctor wearing a bone through his nose and shaking rattles (although a shaman might beat a drum or clap his hands… or even shake a rattle). And it certainly is not a brujo or bruja (a witch) casting malevolent spells. And it’s not the mushroom or cactus eaters of the north. The shaman might employ aspects of any or all of the previous callings in his work but primarily he is a spiritual healer who works with the natural world above, below and around him to put your needs, desires and problems together with the proper sprits. To follow the correct forms and put everything into alignment with all of the energies or winds or chi flowing in the optimum directions.

Looking for a good shaman is quite different in looking for a good plumber. First of all, most of us (gringos especially) have no background or experience with shaman or h’men so we wouldn’t know a shaman from a sham. I’m met and/or been treated by shaman in the Amazon jungles of Peru, the mountains of Guatemala and in various places in the Yucatan. Just to have the gall to claim that you are a shaman (perhaps in the same way that a preacher might claim to have private conversations with God) already puts him sort of out there. If he can do almost anything to back up his claim to be a shaman, I will probably believe him and whatever he says.

I use the pronoun “he” for convenience; the shaman I met and was treated by in Guatemala was a mountain woman with a Masters degree in anthropology. All the rest have been male. And I use the word “shaman”… the same word used by Siberian indigenous peoples probably since before hunters crossed the Bering Straits to the Americas. “H’men” is a Yucatec Mayan work and sounds to me as if it’s root was “shaman.”

I was not looking for the first shamans that I actually met. They just happened to show up in different places, doing their job. Out paths crossed accidentally (if there is such a thing as accidental). But the last two shaman I searched out for specific purposes.

I was led to the first one here in Valladolid. I asked everyone I knew if they knew a shaman, perhaps in their village. Finally, Luis took me to a small and somewhat grubby tienda almost on the outskirts of town. The kind of tienda that stocks one or two small cans of tuna and sardines and Spam, a few packages of crackers, some Bimbo bread and lots of fat, salty snacks and soft drinks. The kind of tienda that you can find on almost any street corner in the small towns and villages of the Yucatan. No one really hopes to make a living out of these small stores; but if they are going to be home all day anyway, why not make a few pesos by selling necesitas to your neighbors? Luis asked the lady gently swinging in the hammock if this is where the shaman lived. She gestured to the back, so we passed through another room where there were more women, children and infants in hammocks. In the third room was a man in a dirty sleeveless tee shirt, resting in a hammock. He sat up in the hammock upon our entrance and greeted us. A woman brought chairs for us. We sat and explained what we were looking for… a blessing ceremony for the Casa Hamaca structures, gardens and land. No problem, he replied.
And told us what we needed to get together for the ceremony.

Our discussion then continued regarding the plants and herbs that he blends and uses for various purposes. This, by the way, this was all in Spanish. But we could all hear that Spanish was not the native language of the shaman. Yucatec Mayan was the language he was most comfortable with.

On the appointed day the shaman appeared at Casa Hamaca pedaling a yellow three-wheeler in which were his supplies. A folding table had already been set up in the middle of the garden for him along with a large number of small cascaras or gourd bowls. Sofi, our Mayan cook, had already made atole as per the shaman’s direction.

On the table the shaman set up a large framed picture of our Lady of Guadalupe at the rear of the table. A wooden board was placed across the table to hold 13 candles.
He then carefully placed 13 cascaras filled with atole on the table. These were kept from tipping and spilling their contents by sitting in a quickly woven ring of palm leaf. The shaman then asked for the names of all who worked or lived at Casa Hamaca. As he lit the candles he asked if we had any incense. I had traditional copal incense. It was the kind of incense that needs to be started with wood or charcoal because it is just chunks of dried tree resin. I had purchased the resin at a bruja’s shop in one of the markets in Tuxla Gutierrez, Chiapas, a few years ago and still had some left.

As the incense started to burn in a small clay bowl, the shaman began his prayers. I was not raised a Roman Catholic but have attended enough Catholic services to recognize some of the liturgy. He sang or chanted in a mixture of Spanish and Mayan… seeming to move back and forth as the one language did not have the correct words for the moment. Frequently making the sign of the Cross, he petitioned a variety of saints to bless our house, bless our land and bless the people who worked and living there. Every so often, I could hear my name and the names of the people who work with me. Every so often I could hear “Padre, hijo y espirto sante” (Father, Son and Holy Ghost). If I closed my eyes, I would have thought that I had been transported to the church across the street and dropped there in the middle of mass.

After extended and repetitive prayers and petitions, the shaman took the still-smoking incense bowl and walked to each of the four corners of the property, walking along side of the stone walls that surround most of the property and continuing his prayers and petitions as he walked. At the four corners, he paused for a short time before continuing. He returned to the table. Snuffed the candles and poured all of the atole into a jug, made a final blessing and then he was done. The casa, the land and all that lived and worked on the land had been blessed. Sofi carried the jug of atole into the kitchen, washed out the cascaras and then filled them again for us all to drink. The entire ceremony took over two hours.

]]> http://casahamaca.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry080111-113611 How to Design and Create Original Murals on the Walls of Your Own Home.


A view of one of the murals in the Main Salon of Casa Hamaca.

As early as I can remember, I always wanted to be an artist. When I was about 5 years old, the local newspaper in Great Falls, Montana, wanted to reproduce some of my drawings, but the technology was just not in place. I grew up in Great Falls surrounded by paintings by Charles Russell, the Western artist of note. One of the town saloons held works by Russell that he had traded to the saloon’s proprietor for drinks. As I grew older my interest in art waxed and waned. At one point I studied Fine Art and Illustration at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and finally recognized that I did not have the talent or the desire to be a fine artist. So I changed direction and studied Industrial Design at Parsons School of Design (now part of the New School), also in NYC. That was a much better direction for me… but it took me away from Art with a capital “A”.


How the previous mural was grided before the image was painted on the wall.

Before I ever came to Mexico, I was entranced with Mexican muralists and painters. They were some of the best in the world. When I came to the Yucatan and saw the murals in Merida and Valladolid, that opinion was validated. Raw, powerful images that changed my consciousness of the Mayan World.

One of my goals at Casa Hamaca was to teach and inform and educate visitors. Educate them about the Mayan people and their culture. To have them experience Mayan food, Mayan people, Mayan healing and Mayan culture.

And one day, BANG, the two ideas came together. I could have Mexican murals on the many walls of Casa Hamaca that visualized various aspects of Mayan culture… images that taught and informed and educated.


The mural in the Ka'ab Na Suite after a popular image in Yucatan elementary school books.

I am too old to climb scaffolding and paint entire walls so I needed a solution that would put murals on my walls without the need of me actually doing the painting.

The solution I came up with is a very simple one that can be applied by almost anyone with a smooth-surfaced wall, a computer, a printer and some photo-editing software.


The original photograph from which the mural was made.


The completed mural.

The Image:
From various source material including original photographs, books and Internet “swipe”, I found a number of images that I would like to have on my walls. I scanned the images from books and saved them along with the “swipe” and the original photos. I selected images of Mayan ruins, carvings, plant photographs and schoolbook illustrations that were very graphic in natural. But almost any image could be used. Line drawings, simple computer-generated illustrations, Pop-Art (like Andy Warhol), etchings and engravings, Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints), comic illustrations and high-contrast black and white photos make life easier and make the transfer of the image much, much simpler.

The Wall:
I took approximate dimensions of the wall spaces that I had to work with. I did this in the metric system since working with that system is much easier than dealing with inches and fractions of inches. Some walls (by their proportions) lent themselves to an image covering the entire wall, others to just a part of the wall.

Matching the Wall to the Image:
I worked with Photoshop to crop the images to match the proportions of the wall. In some cases, I actually took photos of the wall and layered the Mayan-themed image over the wall to see how it would look. When I was satisfied that the image fitted the wall, I used the “Grid” options in Photoshop to overlay a grid on the image. I had to go to Preferences to adjust the Grid options to correspond with the metric system that I was going to use. After creating a new layer in Photoshop, I used the Line tool to draw over the electronic grid, selected the “Fit to Media” option in the Print command and printed a couple of copies of the images, now girded with thin black lines.


The mural in the Chac Na Suite in process.








The Chc Na Suite mural completed.

Grid the Walls:
Using a metric rule (and starting from the upper left hand corner of the wall or of where you want your image to begin) a plumb-bob, a level and a chalk-line, begin laying out the wall, marking off 50 centimeter sections both vertically and horizontally. Then snap lines so that you end up with a wall filled with a grid made up of many 50-centimeter squares.

the Process:
Now you have a wall filled with a grid pattern of squares and a piece of paper with a corresponding grid pattern of squares. Using a pencil, transfer the image, square by square, to the wall. If a particular section of the image is very complicated, break that square down further into smaller squares on both the wall and on the paper. Once you have completed the pencil image for the entire wall, just fill in the blanks with color (paint). An alternative method (if you are sure-handed) is to draw the image directly in paint. If you are dealing with an image that has tonal variations (like a photograph) or naturalistic rendering of objects, use the “Posterize” command in Photoshop to simplify the colors. Play around with the command until you arrive at an image that you like... and that has a number of different colors that you can work with. Using this method, your painting (once you have the outlines drawn on the wall) will be just like the old-fashioned Paint-By-Number kits. In fact, you can number your colors (limiting the number of colors makes the job simpler, expanding the colors makes the final product more naturalistic) and lightly number the corresponding spaces so that you do not put the wrong color in a space. Use regular water-based interior wall paint. Water-based paint makes clean up so much easier. If your mural in outdoors, were sure it is not exposed to direct sunlight for extended periods or it will fade and use exterior paint.





My very first attempt was a reproduction of a rollout of an antique Mayan vase with a complicated image from Mayan mythology. After much trial and error, I selected an image that more or less fit the wall I had in mind. I then Posterized the image in Photoshop to end up with and image composted of eight (8) colors. Using the Eyedropper tool, I selected these colors, placed them all into another document and printed that document on the brightest, whitest paper I had on hand. I took that piece of paper to the paint store and made the best color match I could for the eight colors. The process worked extremely well… however my choice of images did not work as well as I had hoped. So we painted over it with another image that was simpler in execution as well as in design.


The original of the vase rollout used for one of the Salon walls.


The finished mural on the wall. Note: this mural has been painted over and is no longer visible.

Further image selection focused much more on the actual content (what the image represented) as well as on the “style” of the image: i.e.: “painterly, graphic, naturalistic, etc. The result has been a mural in every guest room at Casa Hamaca. Some of them are truly full-wall… filling the entire wall from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. Others are smaller (although still very large) and fill most of a wall.
Certain public spaces also have large images.


A full-wall mural in the Tun Nich Na (or Stone Suite) after stone carvings at Palenque.


The mural seen in setting with furnishings

The Artists:
The first artist I hired was in his early 20’s and had done a little sign painting, I believe. But in no sense of the word was he a trained artist. But he followed my instructions and became confident in his abilities and often painted directly into the squares without first making a pencil drawing. But he gave up on a very complicated drawing (after Catherwood) that filled a very large wall. So I found a pair of young men (perhaps 16 years old?) who show up every day after school and all day Saturday to paint. They have tackled some very difficult images with very fine results. And they both learn as they go so that their most recent efforts are cleaner and faster than their older ones.

There are lots more murals that I have not pictured. If you want to see then, you must come visit in Valladolid.


One of the artists working on the large mural on the second floor, fronting the atrium.

]]> http://casahamaca.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070903-140939 Cochinita Pibil and Tepezcuintle Tacos

Yesterday we were invited to share a meal with a family in the small village of Honuku. A visiting curandera from Queretero was in residence at the Casa Hamaca and last week Sofi (our housekeeper and cook) brought her daughter-in-law (Miñela), granddaughter (Sarahi) and the baby’s other grandmother (Ofelia) to the Casa Hamaca because the baby was sick. Alma, the curandera, worked with the baby on two or three different occasions during the week. The baby seemed to be feeling better and did not exhibit the symptoms that she previously had exhibited. When the grandmother asked how much it cost for the visits, Alma responded that there was no charge. So grandmother Ofelia invited us to a Sunday meal. Sofi, who has Sundays off, offered to come to Casa Hamaca early on Sunday and guide us to the village of Hunuku.

As I have mentioned before in these notes, I am a slow learner. And I had forgotten that when Sofi is in the back seat giving driving directions, it becomes another slap-stick episode since Sofi (who will turn 40 years old this month) doesn’t know her left from her right and gives directions with hand movements only. That means that when we come to a fork in the road or a cross-road, I must remember to look in the rear-view mirror or actually turn around so that I can see better which way Sofi is gesturing …all the while looking out for speeding taxis (the only way into and out of these small villages for most of the people) unused to visiting gringos on a Sunday afternoon; stray turkeys with their little ones (also unused to visiting gringos on a Sunday afternoon…or any other time for that matter) looking for something to eat in the middle of the road; the topes (speed bumps) that can rattle your teeth if you fail to slow down for them; the normal bicycles, tricycles and foot-traffic of the Yucatan; a sow and her piglets trotting across the road at an unmarked “Hog Crossing”; little children running across the little-used road without looking; Sunday drunks weaving down and across the road on their way to the next beer; dogs sleeping in the middle of the sun-warmed road or just wandering around looking for the next best place to take a nap. The small roads between villages are one lane, winding ones, with no shoulders and limited visibility since the jungle grows right to the edge of the road, overhanging it and in some places almost making a tunnel of vegetation. In other words, a normal Sunday ride in the country.

Aside from the traffic problems, add in that Sofi always travels in a taxi, by bicycle or on foot…and so does not really pay attention to turn-offs and crossroads and forks and such. If she is in a taxi, the driver knows his way…if she is on a bicycle or on foot, things pass by slowly enough to draw her to the correct turn. What that really means, is that Sofi often cannot remember where a turn-off is or which fork to take at a decision point.

Now don’t get me wrong; Sofi is not dumb. She is uneducated in Western ways and almost illiterate in regard to books and book learning. She is suspicious and fearful of many "modern" things. If she must answer the cordless phone in the kitchen, she holds it as if it were a live, withering, poisonous snake. But she is very wise and knowledgeable in the things that are important to her and her family in normal village life. Plus she speaks two languages. It is only when she is removed from her normal village surroundings does it become apparent that her education was very different from mine. But when we are in her habitat, my ignorance becomes so frequently and so obviously apparent that good-humored laughter often greets my clumsy attempts to do or say the simplest things.



Ofelia' house



Sofi, Alma and Ofelia in the kitchen

With no mishaps, we arrived at the traditional thatched-roof house (or na, in Yucatec Mayan) of Ofelia and her family. The na was huge… 8 meters by 5 meters (about 26 feet by 16.5 feet)…a single room built in the ancient manner with lashed joints and palm leaf thatching. At one end was the kitchen…three stones on the floor defining where the fire was; a normal-height table mostly covered with dish rack and a five gallon bucket holding drinking water; a low, round table on which to make tortillas a mano (by hand); and another small, low rectangular table at which meals were eaten. A series of low stools (canché) were stacked along one wall of the na. Other than a couple of rickety folding chairs brought out for visitors, these canché and the hammocks were the only places to sit in the entire house.



A traditional stool or canché

The canché were “modern” ones, made from machine-sawed, wooded boards. These modern canché have replaced the older, traditional style carved from a single log. Some of the older types are very simple and basic; others have more style, artistry and comfort. Many of the rooms (both guest rooms and common areas) at Casa Hamaca are furnished with traditional canché stools.

As an aside, the word canché is interesting. The last part of the word, ché, means tree or wood or plant. No problems there. But to my ears, the Mayan words can and k’aan sound exactly the same. So canché translates as wooden snake or serpent or viper; while k’aanché translates as wooden hammock. I’m told that the word for the stool really is canché and not the other. I found that too bad since I like the idea of the word or concept for the wooden seat being that of a "wooden hammock". So, alas, the word actually translates as "wooden serpent". And the word Cancun aptly is frequently translated as "Viper’s Nest" (Can=Serpent or Viper plus K'u'=Nest)…a fitting description of the Sin City Cancun has become. Cancun, in my opinion, ranks right up there with Miami and Las Vegas (along with what was once called Macau in China) as world-class hedonistic magnets. But back to the small village of Hunuku.



The exposed-thatch ceiling above the fireplace was blackened with smoke. When I asked how old the house was, Don Martin, the husband, told me it was built a year before Hurricane Gilberto (1988) and survived that storm and all of the subsequent ones with no damage. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling beams. On a table at the opposite end of the na was a television, tuned to an afternoon futbol (soccer) game. A few simple shelves held all of the belongings of the family.



Making tortillas a mano



Cooking the tortillas on the comal



Sofi making the salsa

After we had been greeted, Ofelia stated making tortillas a mano on the small round table (many of the guestrooms at Casa Hamaca are furnished with these traditional tortilla tables) and then flipping the tortillas onto the comal to cook. Sofi ground chilies and lime juice in a molcajete (more or less a mortar and pestle) to make a rich and flavorful condiment for the meal to come. When Sofi was finished with the chilies, she sat at one of the small tables and separated meat from bones and placed the meat in a small bowl. No one had told us what the main course would be but I had seen a still-warm pib (in-ground fire pit) in the backyard. Cochinita pibil? Or maybe Relleno Negro?

While we were waiting for Sofi and Ofelia to finish preparations for the meal, Don Martin and I chatted. About his milpa (garden) and the eijido (community-owned land on which any of the villagers could farm). Don Martin said that since almost 75% of the local men now work outside of the village during the week, he really had his choice of where he wanted to farm. He only cultivates about 2 hectares (about 5 five acres) at a time. He does it the traditional way. He prepares the area by first cutting down all of the shrubs and trees, letting them dry and then burning them. This re-nourishes the soil as well as gets rid of any weeds so that he can grow corn for another two or three years before he must prepare another field in the same manner.



Don Martin showing some of his antler collection

We spoke of the alux (see previous notes for more on the alux) and of the hurricanes (Hurricane Felix had just been upgraded to a Category 2 on it’s way to becoming a Category 5 hurricane) and of building houses and of copal incense (pom) and of the deer in the forests and jungle. Don Martin proudly showed off his collection of deer antlers. I did not diminish his pride by telling him that the antlers he showed me would be humiliating to show in Montana or North Dakota or Minnesota or even New Jersey since they were so small, with so few points. We spoke of how cool his house was during the heat of the summer. I did my best to explain that even the coolest nights in his village were still very warm to someone from the north. That doors were not left wide open during the day, year around, in the north. That walls were thick and roofs were not thatch. That it was so cold that water turned to ice and snow. Now that was stretching things a little since that kind of experience is out of their realm of reality. I further compounded their incredulity with stories of ice fishing and driving cars and trucks out on to the ice. I believe they think that I was just telling tall tails to amuse them before dinner.

When all was ready, Alma (the curandera) and I were invited to eat first (after all, we were the guests of honor); when we almost finished the adults of the family (including the women) joined us to eat their meal followed by the younger members of the family when the adults were finished. There were no children other than the infant so we could not see how other children might fit into the eating hierarchy. Before we sat down, we were offered a bucket of water in which to wash our hands.

Alma and I were seated at the small round table. On the table were a stack of freshly made tortillas; two shallow bowls, each filled with a different shredded meat; and a small bowl of the chili sauce that Sofi had just made. One of the shallow bowls held cochinita pibil, a traditional Sunday meal in the Yucatan. Cochinita pibil is pork meat that has been rubbed with achiote paste, wrapped in banana leaves to keep the meat moist, and then buried in the fire pit to bake. It is, in my experience, always tender and delicious. Gringos like me are sometimes served “cochinita light”…just the meat without the flavorful grasa (or fat) or the baked liver. Cochinita is traditionally served with raw chopped onions and, of course, chilies.



Alma, Don Martin, Ofelia, Sofi and Carlos seated on modern canché.
The bowl in the center of the round table holds the mystery meat.

The other bowl held shredded meat that looked a little like chicken. The meat was mixed with chopped radish, cilantro and chili. When I asked what kind of meat this was, I was told it was tepezcuintle. Now that helped a lot! What was its Spanish name? Tepezcuintle is the only name it is called they responded. How big is a tepezcuintle? About this high, indicating with his hands, and about this long…??? Since Don Martin was making these hand gestures over the table, I was not sure if the height was from the table to his hands or from the floor to his hands. When I asked if it were the size of a dog, he laughed and said "No…smaller". “Bigger than a rabbit?” I asked. “Oh, yes, bigger than a rabbit. Maybe up to 10 kilos or so (about 22 pounds). It only comes out at night and lives in a cave in the ground”. “It eats vegetables and fruits and plants and roots,” Martin offered before I could ask. All I could picture was something like a muskrat. Yuck! Where did this one come from? “I got it yesterday evening on the road” Road kill??? “I shot it with my shotgun. What good luck it was to get it for company, verdad?” “And, no, you cannot buy this meat at a market. It is against the law.”

OK, I said to myself, I am here for the experience. If I didn’t eat it, I would never know what it tasted like. After all, I ate pressed and fried guinea pig in Peru and was not the worse from the experience…how much different could this be even if it were muskrat?

Oops! Another meal with no utensils. I waited for Alma to start, watching her out of the corner of my eye. Right! Now I remember. Tear a tortilla, like you would cut a pizza. Take about a quarter of the triangle-shaped tortilla and use it to grasp and hold some meat…and then pop it right in your mouth.

I first tried the cochinita since I knew I would like that. And I did...it was delicious.
Then I took a piece of the tortilla and grabbed some of the “other white meat”. By this time Sofi, recognizing that I was not used to eating without utensils, brought a spoon for the salsa and spoons for the meat. So I was able to add a little chili to the meat before eating. It wasn’t quite like sabor de pollo (tastes like chicken) that even the locals use to describe some meats not usually on the dinner plate. It was, perhaps, a little like mutton (without the fat) or goat…without the gamey taste that some wild meats have. So I had another. Ofelia served orange soda in plastic cups. I drank mine quickly since I saw that the flies were as interested in the soda as I was. Later I noticed that the adults covered their cups with a tortilla to keep out the flies. Tortillas were also used as napkins to clean fingers, faces and mouths.

After the meal we were given a tour of the grounds and shown a small pen with two young pigs. We were invited to help eat one of them as part of a relleno negro in November for their Day of the Dead observance.

Sofi’s husband, Carlos, had joined us for the meal by riding his bicycle from his village of Yalcoba to Hunuku. Since I was driving a minivan, I asked him if he would like to put the bike in the back and ride with us when we took Sofi home. But, of course! It took us about 10 minutes to go from Hunuku through another nameless village to Yalcoba. Carlos told us it takes him about an hour to ride the same route and Sofi added that it took her over an hour and a half to walk the same distance.



Alma treating the new bride

We went to the house of Carlos’ parents. Five of seven kids of Carlos and Sofi were there as well as Carlos’ mother and the new bride of one of Sofi’s sons. Alma worked with/on the grandmother as well as a couple of the kids attempting to cure their ills. She tried to determine if the new bride is pregnant yet but could not make a definite determination as yet. The bride is late, but it is still to soon to tell. We were asked if we would like some atole…atole made with fresh green corn rather than the dried corn that is usually used. Atole, as drunk by the Maya, is a thick mixture of water and masa or ground corn. It can be comsumed warm, room-temperature or cold and it can be sweetened or spiced with cinnamon or chilies. It is a staple of the farmers while working their milpas. Why not? I had already put my delicate gringo stomach at risk, why not go the whole way. I always tell visitors to Mexico NOT to drink the water…that is, to always drink only bottled, purified water. I was sure that the atole had not been made with purified water, but I said OK. Yes, I would like to try the atole. The taste was different. A cleaner, greener, fresher taste with some natural sweetness to it. We took our leave and returned to Valladolid.



The paca, paka, agouti, haaleb, tepezcuintle or tapescuinlte
Cute, isn't he?

The first thing I did upon arrival was to try to identify the strange meat… tepezcuintle. Now I cannot pronounce that word let along spell it. After numerous failed attempts at Googling the word, an alternate spelling gave me the information that we ate a paca or an agouti, a rodent with a range from Mexico to the tip of South America that is commonly eaten. In Mexico, it called tepezcuintle, also spelled tapescuinlte while the Mayan name is haaleb.

When I finally lay down in my hammock, I tried to listen to my body to see if any of the food or liquid I had ingested was going to cause me a problem. My body told me everything was OK and not to worry so I dropped off to sleep for over 10 hours. Maybe haaleb could be marketed as a remedy for insomnia. Quien sabé?


]]> http://casahamaca.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070825-065519 What Pyramids and Cenotes Have In Common

I was born in North Dakota and raised in Montana, so I am used to being able to see a big sky…and flat land. When driving through eastern North Dakota, I used to joke as we crossed an overpass that “This is the highest point in North Dakota”. It certainly seemed that way; you could see all the way to the unbroken horizon. Almost like being on the ocean, the expanse was so vast it seemed to go on forever. The very- low rolling hills flattened out with distance so that North Dakota seemed flat as a pancake.

When I first visited the Yucatan, I felt the same…I even made the same jokes as we drove an overpass…”This must be the highest point in the Yucatan”.


View from the summit of the main pyramid at Cobá

The view from the top of a pyramid is even more impressive. Flat. Absolutely flat! Without a hill or even a ripple. So flat that when it rains there is no “down hill” for the water to run, so the water sits in large puddles until it slowly drains into the earth or evaporates from the blazing sun. When walking through pre-Hispanic ruins, almost every time the very same revelation strikes me (I’m a slow learner, after all). That mound over there covered with trees and shrubs and looks like a hill is NOT a hill. There are no hills here. Dah! That is an as-yet unexcavated Mayan ruin.

What go me to thinking about the flatness of the Yucatan was all of the climbing that I have recently been doing. Climbing up and then returning down; climbing down and then back up. I’ve had some recent visitors that I took sightseeing. And almost all of the sights involve climbing both up and down (pyramids) or down and up (cenotes or caves) steps or stairs or ladders or ramps or paths.

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The main pyramid at Cobá

Doesn't look like such a big deal, does it?
Let's add some people in to give it some perspective.

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The main pyramid at Cobá with people

Pyramids are obvious. They stick up out of the ground and you can make an estimate of how high they are, how steep they are, how many steps have to be climbed (both up and then back down). Most people can make a semi-informed guesstimate, based upon past experiences, if they make it up and back down without a helicopter being called in to extract them from the top of a pyramid. The main pyramids of both Uxmal and Chichen Itza are now off-limits to climbing (and probably will remain that way). So, if you have already climbed one of them, you will have bragging rights with your grandchildren someday. If you’ve climbed both, you can start your bragging immediately.

But the main pyramids at both Ek Balam and Cobá are still open to climbers. The largest Ek Balam pyramid is higher than the Castillo at Chichen Itza, has a narrower width of steps than the Castillo and has no safety rope. I’m not sure of the pitch of the steps, but it seems to me that Ek Balam is steeper than the Castillo as well. The lack of the safety rope (or guide rope) is not bad going up. After all, your eyes are looking directly at the steps that your feet will be on in just a few seconds.

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Guide Rope at Cobá

Just before my first ascent of a pyramid, some kind soul told me to walk up (and down) in a zigzag pattern. Because the treads are generally narrower (less deep) than the code-approved steps that most of us are used to in the gringo north AND because the risers (the vertical distance between the steps) are so much higher than those to which we are accustomed, walking up or down using a zig-zag pattern allows us almost our normal gait or stride. Don’t believe me? Try it.

I have asked a couple of professional archaeologists why the Maya, who are generally shorter in stature, constructed their steps in this manner. The best answer I received was this method produced the tallest structure with the least amount of stone (read: work). That made sense to me. The reason to build the structures in the first place was to re-create a mountain top where you (or the priest) could be closer to God, Dios, Chac or whom/whatever other divinity you might be searching for. The height was the main objective…not the comfort level of the steps. So it made great economic sense for them to build as high as possible with the least amount of work possible. On the other hand, the steps leading to the viewing area at the main ball court at Cobá are built for people to actually use without any major strain. The risers are almost a standard height and the treads are spacious.

Coming back down from the top of a pyramid is another story. At least for me it is, and from my observations of other climbers over the years, a fair number of other people as well. At Chichen Itza’s Castillo, most people just walked up, sometimes using their hands to reach up a few steps to help pull themselves up as they got closer to the top. Some people needed the guide rope to get up. Watching people come down was almost like viewing an old slapstick silent-film. Some of the younger ones ran down the steps (without the zigzag pattern), others strode majestically down, hardly ever looking at their feet. Still others cautiously advanced the same foot forward and downward, sometimes with the use of one or both hands to steady themselves. Some slide down on their butts, bump by bump. Many used the guide rope bisecting the steps. Some walked down, lightly staying in contact with the rope. Others came down backward holding on to the rope for dear-life. Yesterday I was at the main pyramid of Cobá. I had just descended and was sitting on a bench at the bottom waiting for a friend when the skies opened up with a brief, but drenching, rain shower. The stone steps suddenly became slick with the moisture and very slippery. The people caught on the steps hurried down as fast as they were able without their feet sliding out from under them. Not a good place to be caught if lightning started.

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It's a long way down!

Heights do strange things to people. At Ek Balam, I watched a man, on his way back down; freeze about ten feet from the top of the pyramid. He could not move. His wife could not help him in any way. There was no guide rope to aid him. He sat there for at least 15 minutes before working up his courage enough to make his way down a few steps using a technique somewhere between the butt-sliding method and a hands-behind-the-back crab-walking one. I had to leave before he made his next move, but I am sure that it took him a long, long time to make his descent.

I watched him because I knew how close I had been many times to the same paralyzing fear. The fear starts at the bottom of the ascent…because I realize then that I will have to come back down. The fear grows are I ascend. The higher I go, the greater the fear until I reach the top. Then I must go as far away as possible from any edge, preferably with my back against some solid structure. I check out the view but I cannot really enjoy it, as others seem to because all I can concentrate on is the descent. Because many of the pyramids are so steep, you cannot actually see the steps until you are very close to the edge. The lack of visual clues such as a banister or railing doesn’t help either. Looking down, my stomach lurches and sweat breaks out over my entire body. There is nothing I can do about it, the fear has been there my entire life and will remain with me to my dying day. That first step down, almost always a side step, seems endless. A lifetime until my toe touches the top of that first step. The already overly high riser seems even higher than it actually is. I must stretch to reach the next step. If I look straight out, all I see is jungle. And if I look down, all I see is myself falling, bouncing, and rolling down the steps only to end up dead and spread-eagled on the ground at the base of the pyramid. Somehow I get down, vowing never to subject myself to the same humiliation again. Vowing to never again climb another pyramid, never go on the roof of my house, never even climb another ladder.

But then, I go and do it again.

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Cenote Zaci in Valladolid

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Balankanche Caves

The sightseeing adventures over the past few days have included three cenotes and one cave. All underground. All with long (and sometimes steep and slippery) descents. All had some sort of guide rope or handrail. Two of the cenotes and the cave (obviously, otherwise they would call it something else) had artificial lights of some kind. The third cenote was partially open to the sky and had ample natural light. Here the descents were less difficult. I often could not actually see the bottom of the stairs since they faded into darkness as well as sometimes twisted and turned around a bend. If I looked straight ahead, I was looking into a solid rock faces, sometimes inches from my eyes. I had to be careful not to bump my head on the uneven rock surface of the ceiling during the descent. And I could use my hands, both to grip the rope as well as to guide me down by following the rock walls by touch. A very tactile experience. Because of the touch I felt connected with the earth and, even though the steps were as steep (sometimes steeper) than those of a pyramid and the vertical distances were almost exactly the same (plus or minus 30 meters above ground level and below ground level…I wonder if anyone has studied the relative heights of pyramids vs. cenotes as a basis for their thesis? After all, the ceiba tree has roots as deep as the branches are tall, verdad?), I did not experience the vertigo that I experience while descending a pyramid. I had the concern of slipping on moist stone steps, but not the fear of falling to the bottom.

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Underground Ceremonial Site at the Balankanche Caves

In the cave where the only source of light was artificial, I experienced momentary claustrophobia, thinking of the tons of rock above my head…and seeing the broken fragments of rock that had already fallen from the ceiling of the cave. How would I ever find my way out if the lights went out? I cursed myself for not bringing a pocket flashlight. And I thought of the miners in Utah and in China who, at the time this was written, were trapped in mine cave-ins, perhaps struggling for their lives at that very moment. Perhaps already dead.

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And again was able to put my life and my fears in perspective.





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There’s more to dirt than meets the eye…CSI in the Yucatan

A few weeks ago I touched on the rumor that my property might have been inhabited before the Spanish colonials showed up. Because of it location on a high piece of ground, there might have been a dwelling or even a more permanent site of some sort. Perhaps a clue showed up yesterday.

If you’ve bothered to read my previous posts, you will have read that I have found shards in many, many places in north, south and central America. And I’m not the only one. I had a friend with whom I attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City. During the 1960s he and his family moved to the state of Puebla in Mexico. He lived and painted there for over 9 years before returning to the US. When he returned, he told me that virtually every time someone dug a well or excavated for a house foundation they came across clay shards and figurines. He showed me a cigar box full of clay figures, heads and small animals.

A friend of mine from Argentina, knowing that I have an interest in pre-Hispanic cultures gave me a painted clay object that had been found on her family’s ranch in NW Argentina. I’m not at all sure what it is…kind of looks like a bottle stopper to me. Perhaps that is what it was…a stopper for a ceramic jug or jar.







I was in Peru, just south of Lima and still on the coast. A friend was showing me an ancient adobe city that was almost completely eroded. An archaeological dig was going on right along-side the road, at a low area. My driver stopped the car and hunkered down in the shade of the car to wait for us at least 10 meters away from the dig. I wandered over to the dig and begin to question the man in charge. I’m not quite sure how I knew he was the man in charge, but he was. I was asking and he was answering in Spanish…not great Spanish on either side. He looked Asian and since there are many Asians in the Lima area I just assumed he was Japanese. When I finally asked him where he was from and he replied Southern Illinois University, we both laughed and switched to English as it was more comfortable for both of us. After a brief chat, I returned to the car and as we dove off, the driver showed me what he had found in the dirt near the car. Two kernels of corn…one almost black, the other yellow, both very dry. A shell. And a broken piece of bone about 4 inches long…it looked to me to be a human rib bone. All of this just lying there in the dirt.

When I was a boy in Montana, I often found Indian arrowheads and traces of early European settlers.. The point being that anywhere people have been before us, they might have left traces of themselves.

Yesterday as my workers and I were sitting down to lunch, one of the workers pointed out an object sitting on the window ledge and asked me what it was. I had never seen it before. Nor had anyone else, except Sofia, the housekeeper. She said that it had been in the same place since she had been working for us. There had been a lot of changeover in the workers around the property over the past three or four months so no one said “I found it and put it there”.

One of the workers identified it as a tooth, but when I looked at it, I thought not. It looked more like a bone to me. A finger bone! At lunch we joked about where the object came from. Everyone showed their spread fingers to demonstrate all their fingers were intact and it was not their bone. After lunch I referenced my copy of Frank Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy. I first looked up the finger bones and then the toe bones. And there on Plate 505 was a match. The Proximal Phalange of the right big toe or the biggest bone in the big toe. Now, I’m not an anatomist nor a pathologist nor a surgeon, but the match looked right to me. But I’m certainly open to correction if someone can identify it.












Then the questions arose, whose toe was it? Where did it come from? How old is it? Mayan or Spanish? Did an animal bring the bone here from a burial site? Or is this the burial site itself? Did someone chop off a toe with a machete while cutting wood? Is there a tomb on the property? A relic from the Caste War?

Obviously more questions than answers. Anyone with any thoughts about this?

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Last night I read a number of reviews of the film Apocalypto, directed by Mel Gibson, on iTunes. There were over 250 reviews (some of which I skimmed and some of which I read every word) of the movie. The dialogue of the movie is entirely in Yucatec Maya…the language of the entire northern portion of the peninsula of Yucatan. And that is unique. The reviews ranged from “it ok movie but Mel Gibson is semistic (sic) so it ruins the movie” to many who said that it was the best movie of 2006. Many people commented on Mel Gibson rather than on the movie. Many took one side or the other on historical accuracy. So I felt I had to get my two cents in.

I live in Valladolid, Yucatan, less than 25 miles from the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza. I eat Mayan food every day. And I hear Yucatec Mayan spoken every day. So that must make me an expert on all things Mayan, right? OK listen up!

First of all, I found a copy of the original shooting script for Apocalypto. Here it is.

“The top of the Sacrificatorio is broken and ruined, but there is no doubt that it once supported an altar for those sacrifices of human victims which struck even the Spanish with horror. It was barely large enough for the altar and officiating priests, and the idol to whom the sacrifice was offered. The whole was in full view of the people at the foot.

“The barbarous ministers carried up the victim entirely naked, pointed out the idol to which the sacrifice was made, that people might pay their adorations, and then extended him upon the altar. This had a convex surface, and the body of the victim lay arched, with the trunk elevated and the head and feet depressed. Four priests held the legs and arms, and another kept his head firm with a wooden instrument made in the form of a coiled serpent, so that he was prevented from making the least movement. The head priest then approached, and with a knife made of flint cut an aperture in the breast, and tore out the heart, which, yet palpitating, he offered to the sun, and then threw it at the feet of the idol.

… “If the victim was a prisoner of war, as soon as he was sacrificed they cut off his head to preserve the scull (sic), and threw the body down the steps, where it was taken up by the officer or soldier to whom the prisoner belonged, and carried to his house to be dressed and served up as entertainment for his friends”

This was written by John L. Stephens in his book, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, Vol. II, Dover Edition, Copyright 1969, about the ruins at Santa Cruz del Quiché in Guatemala, originally written in 1840 and first published in 1841.

Secondly, I thought it was great that the film was shot in Yucatec Maya (even though most of the actors, if not all of them, had to learn their lines in Mayan). I showed the film to Sofia, a Mayan friend who only speaks Spanish with gringos like me; at home, in the streets or at the market she speaks Yucatec Maya (as do approximately one and one half million other people on the Yucatan peninsula). She had trouble understanding the movie. I’m not sure if it was because the actors didn’t do such a great job, if they had bad accents or if Sofia just wasn’t used to hearing the Mayan language coming out of speakers.

Almost all of the people with whom I am in contact on any given day are Maya and speak Mayan. Many still live in houses like the ones shown in the village scenes. If you want to experience the Mayan culture, come on down. It still exists. The descendents of the people who built the pyramids are still alive and well.

Most of Mexico was quickly conquered by the Spanish and their Indian allies. But they never really conquered the Mayans. The last Mayan Rebellion (War of the Castes) was not officially over until 1913. And I have heard skirmishes still occurred into the 1930s. But now the Mayans are friendly and welcoming. Climbing one of their pyramids after seeing the film puts a whole new light on things. As does cutting through their jungle with a steel machete.

I can’t comment on the accuracy of any part of the film except for one thing: If the sighting of the Spanish ship was supposed to be the first interaction between the Spanish and the mainland Amerindians, there was a slight problem with geography. The first recorded meeting took place in the Yucatan (in what is now the state of Quintana Roo). The Yucatan peninsula is, for the most part, flat as a pancake. There are no hills, no mountains, no rivers and no waterfalls. One would have to go a long way south to Belize or southwest to Chiapas or Guatemala to find such terrain. Far enough away so that, even if you ran really, really hard, you couldn’t make it back in time to save you wife and children from drowning. Other than that, I thought everything was immensely interesting and detailed.

Bottom line: I liked the movie and I am sure that I will see it numerous times.
I gave it 5 Stars.
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In almost every place I have lived or traveled to, a rock was just a rock. In Montana the rock might have a bit of agate or quartz in it. In North Carolina, perhaps, a bit of mica. In Yellowstone Park there was obsidian. But basically they were just rocks. Something to skim across a pond. Or shoot with a slingshot. Or throw at a target. But, still just a rock. Without age or character or interest. A few times I accompanied my father on fieldwork in Montana where he was collecting various types of rock for a geology class. I never thought to look for fossils during these outings. Although some of the places we went later turned out to be full of interesting fossils.

I’ve been around gravel pits and sand pits and rock quarries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York and never paid any attention to the rocks themselves. I’ve lived in New Hampshire and in Switzerland where rocks seem to be everywhere, but didn’t notice them except when they were in my way.

The only times that rocks had any age or dynamics seemed to be places where they were still growing. Did I really mean to say, “Rocks were growing?” Yes, I did. In Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, in Lewis and Clark Caverns in Montana and in Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, you could see the stalactites and the stalagmites growing millimeter by millimeter as drops of mineral-laden water fell from them or unto them. You couldn’t actually see them grow, but you could feel them growing, you could sense the change and the growth. The other place I saw rocks growing was on the Big Island of Hawaii. We rented a small airplane to fly near the volcanoes and to see the red-hot lava falling into the ocean, instantly vaporizing water into steam and changing from liquid lava into solid stone. I had a similar experience/feeling when I explored Pompeii. I could picture the ash being compressed into stone over time.

But, for the most part, rocks were just rocks. Nothing more, nothing less.

But here in the Yucatan, things are different. Rocks are living. Rocks are growing. Rocks have spirits (I’ll write about that later). And at the same time, the rocks are very old...they seem ageless. About nine years ago, I was leaning against a stone fence, separating two properties in Sierra Papacal, a small village near Merida. I was on a volunteer mission project building concrete roofs on houses of people in need and working with Mano Amiga. I was whipped. The day was hot, I was out of shape and I had not been drinking enough water. So I was resting and getting ready to go back to work when I happened to actually look that the stone fence on which I was resting. The stones weren’t huge, but they were a good size…perhaps 10 to 15 kilos each (22 to 33lbs). As I looked at them closer and closer, I saw more and more seashells imbedded into the rock. Fossilized remains of long-dead sea creatures. As I looked closer, I saw that virtually every rock contained fossils of sea dwellers. I remembered enough of my high school earth science course to realize that these were probably sedimentary rocks, built up layer by layer beneath the sea, trapping the seashells and surrounding them. At some point either the sea level dropped or the land rose from the sea and the rock was exposed to air.

This exposed limestone sat patiently for thousands of years waiting for the Mayan builders to utilize the stone for their houses, their temples and their pyramids. The Mayan builders quarried, cut, dressed and carved all of their building blocks without metal tools. That blows me away. Every time I hit a limestone rock with a steel hammer and the hammer bounces off, I wonder how did the Mayans do it and how long did it take them to form all the blocks for even a small pyramid? In modern times, the rock is still quarried for foundations, for exposed-stone walls, for architectural and ornamental carvings and to make decorative tiles. Some of the bathrooms at Casa Hamaca are tiled with natural limestone tiles that expose various kinds and sizes of fossilized seashell. They are natural stone cut to the desired thickness and size and then lightly polished to remove most of the saw marks. Here’s a few photos of the tile at Casa Hamaca; Every one of the seashells is a fossil. That's still amazing to me.







The entire northern portion of the Yucatan peninsula is a limestone shelf that once was underwater. It seems solid enough, but it’s not. It’s dynamic and changing…almost living. The geology of the Yucatan is much like that of Florida. Flat. A flat limestone crust with channels, streams and rivers running under the crust. In Florida, when the alkaline limestone becomes eaten away by the acid in the rains and the crust weakens and eventually collapses, it is called a sinkhole. It seems every year or so there is a news story about a house or an automobile getting gobbled by a quickly forming sinkhole. The same type of thing happens in the Yucatan except here they are called cenotes (but I cannot remember any cenotes gobbling up a car or a house). With the exception of a very few small lakes, there is no surface water in the northern part of the Yucatan. The cenotes were and still are the only constant water supply. They were life giving and villages and cities grew up around the cenotes since they were the source of year-round water.

There are no real lakes, no rivers, no streams in the northern Yucatan. At least on the surface there are none. But beneath the surface of the Yucatan, underneath the limestone shelf, underground rivers flow into underground lakes. The entire Yucatan is honeycombed with them, interconnecting to form a vast underground world. And the surface is riddled with cenotes. There are probably dozens if not hundreds of new cenotes currently forming as the acidic rain leaches away the alkaline limestone. There’s some great graphics on this link: http://www.smm.org/sln/ma/chichen.html that show the stages of cenote formation. And some simple experiments with chalks that demonstrate how the rock is eaten away.

Some cenotes have a very small opening to the surface with an underground cavern considerably larger hidden underneath the surface, like the cenote at Dzitnup near Valladolid. Some of the cenotes are literally just holes in the ground. The main cenote at Chichen Itza, for instance, has vertical sides and maybe as much as 100 meters (110 yards) across, but is just hole in the ground. Still others are in the transition stage between the two previous examples…like Cenote Zaci in the center of Valladolid. It has partially collapsed, but the enormous slaps of rock that once formed the ceiling of the cenote now lie scattered and shattered many feet below the surface of the ground.

And that’s another place you can see the rock grow. Many of the cenotes, caves and caverns in the Yucatan have stalactites and stalagmites. They are growing drip by drip.

This morning my friend, Ponce, took me to the jungle near Valladolid to show me a cenote. He wants me to buy a piece of land on which the cenote is located. I told him that without water, land is worthless. He assured me the water was there, the cenote was there. In fact, he said there was even a second cenote much further into the jungle. We parked beside the road and grabbed our machetes. Ponce led the way into the jungle, following a distinct path that was almost hidden in places by the plant growth on either side of the path. We really needed the machetes. Ponce pointed out the plants not to touch and pointed out the ones that are good to eat. After about 1/2 hour of playing Indiana Jones, we came to an open field populated by some Brahma bulls and cows…and a dozen young boys from a nearby village on their way to the cenote to swim. We joined up with the boys and continued on a much more frequently used and open path to the cenote.

The cenote is very deep; Ponce says 20 meters or almost 66 feet to the water. It’s difficult for me to judge depth, but it was a long, long way down. This cenote has no name but is similar in some ways to the one at Dzitnup. There was a main opening, a hole, less than ten meters (about 33 feet) across. With the brilliance of the sun, it was hard to see into the opening, but with a little patience, waiting until the clouds covered the sun, you could see that the cenote opened up to a much larger space near the water level. It space was shaped somewhat like a mayonnaise jar with a hole the size of a quarter cut in the lid. That was the main opening to the cenote. When the sun was just right, I could see there was dry land down there at the bottom. As well as the larger opening, there was another one nearby of four or five meters (13 to 16 feet) across, but it was so overgrown with trees, shrubs and bushes, that it was impossible to determine even the shape of the opening. And then there were another five or so much smaller openings to the larger underground chamber. One of them had rocks mortared around it in a circle forming a well-like location from which to draw up water by the bucketful.



The leaning tree on the left of this photo is the one on which the boys are climbing down on the following photos. This image has been photoshoped to attempt to bring out some of the interior detail.





All of the openings allowed light to penetrate to the furthest depths and, depending on time of day, allow sunbeams to strike the surface of the water. That’s what made this cenote so beautiful and so similar to Dzitnup, the sunbeams on the water. Great flocks of a beautiful bird flew in and out of the main opening. Butterflies flittered about. Vine-like tendrils seemed suspended from the edge of the opening all the way to water level. Plants covered one side of a huge stalactite that hung down almost to the water below. Other stalactites formed bizarre shapes. The boys kept warning me not to step in one of the smaller holes or to go too close to the edge of the big one. Hey, don’t worry; I’m not going down there! But the boys did. There was a very large tree leaning against one edge of the largest opening. The boys scampered down it like monkeys to jump into the water. I could not see how far down the tree actually went. Perhaps it was growing from one of the dry areas at the bottom.

While we were standing there watching the boys swim, I tried to envision what I would do with this cenote if the land around it became mine. For access, I pictured a spiral staircase leading all the way to the bottom from the second largest opening. The flat terrain would allow a rough road to be cut leading to the cenote area. But that’s as far as I could picture it without seeing what was at the bottom of the cenote. Could it be developed as a tourist attraction? Did it have a natural, temperature-stable cave in which to age cheese? Or wine? Or was there a hidden temple? Or a buried treasure? I knew I could not get down the tree trunk and ever get back up…so maybe I will have to just send my camera and see the cenote through another’s eyes. But I think I want to know what’s at the bottom of the cenote.













]]> http://casahamaca.com/pblog/index.php?entry=entry070617-113640 The Thrill of Discovery: There's Old Stuff All Around Us



“Eureka! I’ve found gold!”
I don’t remember if those were my exact words since I was only about 11 years old at the time, but I know I was very excited. I had found a rock with a vein of glittery, shiny, gold. I lived in Bozeman, Montana, at the edge of town. So I could freely wander the creeks and the woods and the fields that abutted where we lived. My friend and I were wading in the creek looking for whatever struck the fancy of an 11-years old boy when we came across the gold-filled rocks. We had struck it rich! The mother lode! When I showed my prize to my father (who had his master’s degree in soil mechanics and lots of geology under his belt), he explained that my discovery was just iron pyrite. Alas, it was the mother lode of iron pyrite sometimes known as fool’s gold …and I was the fool. POP! There went my dream-bubble.

Since that time, there have been any number of “Eureka” moments in my life. One of the most memorable was the discovery of my first ceramic shard while attending an archaeological field school in northern Belize. Most of the school participants were anthropology undergrads fulfilling a field school requirement. Another large group comprised grad students and post-grads working on specific projects. A small group of us were just interested volunteers, along for the ride, and hoping to experience archaeological fieldwork. Along with two undergrads and one other volunteer, I was assigned to a professional archaeologist and his guide. Our project took place in the heart of the jungle. Every morning, we were loaded in the back of an old pickup truck and driven to the drop-off point for the work site. To get there, we followed the axel-deep ruts of previous passages by the pickup, trying to avoid getting stuck. We had to stop every few hundred yards to open and then close the barbed wire gates. One field full of cows, the next corn, the next cows, the next corn, etc. We could not allow the cows into the cornfield. If we did the farmer who owned the land where the digs were would stop the projects cold. So we were very careful.

Our first stop was near a small hill at the edge of the fields. We dropped off a group that was digging there and looking for a burial site. We had to drive for about another 10 minutes to the end of the line before we got out. We crawled over or under another barbed wire fence and then followed Ricky (our guide). Every day he had to chop back the jungle with his machete to keep our path clear. The jungle almost grew faster than he could keep up with it. Our objective was to discover the general plan and dimensions of a residential complex. A very small part of a much larger site. Kind of boring compared to looking for a tomb! The previous group of diggers had laid out a one meter-wide set of lines running over a small mound. My job was, shovel-full by shovel-full, to uncover all of the dirt and rubble, down to bedrock, to the other side of the mound. I was in Belize for two weeks for the field school and it was the most physically demanding two weeks that I have ever spent in my life. It was hot and humid. Once we entered the jungle in the morning we never saw the sun for the rest of the day, but we sure felt its heat. Everything just dripped with moisture. Using small mason trowels and brushes, we removed the dirt and filled a 5-gallon bucket with the mixed dirt and rubble. Then we screened every bit of the dirt through a framed square of hardware cloth… made from welded wire with 1/4 inch opening. The dirt easily passed through the screen, the larger pieces didn’t. We had to sort through everything that was left looking for ceramics, bones, flint, obsidian, jade, wood or anything else unusual. And then bag and tag any findings. After about the third or fourth bucket, I suddenly saw my first shard (or sherd). It really was a “WOW” moment. I had just discovered (actually uncovered) something that had been made by man and had been hidden for hundreds of years beneath the earth. I felt like Indiana Jones. It was so exciting to see and then hold this small piece of broken clay. I ran to the archaeologist to show him. Ho-hum. Just another piece of a broken jar. After the first piece, my eye had learned what to look for and I discovered sometimes dozens of pieces with each screening. Nothing of real consequence but filled with rich meaning for me.

Earlier that same year, I had been in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for the first time. I had a few hours to explore a local market before leaving to visit the local archaeology museum and then on to the Mayan ruins at Copan. I wandered through the market seeing nothing of great interest, nothing I thought was unique to the area. Since I have a mask collection of over 60 pieces from numerous places around the world, I asked at a few shops if they had any masks. One or two had some freshly carved wooden masks for the tourist trade, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. When I attempted to explain that I was looking for old masks or ones that had been used ceremonially, a shopkeeper beckoned me to enter her shop. After we talked for a few minutes she reached beneath one of the counters, literally under the counter, brushed away a handful of spider webs and withdrew an old cigar box. Old and dusty and slightly moldy and covered with mouse droppings. And full of small clay figures and broken pots. I had never seen a shard before or if I had, never paid any attention to them so I didn't really know what I was looking at. The contents of the box were for sale. I selected two of the intact small clay figures and as I paid for them, the box was returned under the counter.


The two figures I purchased in San Pedro Sula

I met up with the tour and went to the archaeology museum and there, in a showcase, saw one of the figurines that I had just purchased. It was part of a display showing how 1000 years ago, mass-produced whistles were made by casting clay in molds. The very same figure! Made last week in an original mold? Or found on a washed-out riverbank where it had been uncovered by the floods, a riverbank where it had been lost 1000 years ago? ¿Quien sabe? Some time almost two weeks later, and in another country, I showed the pieces to my guide. He was an experienced digger and guide at Copan as well as having extensive experience at other Mayan sites in Honduras, Guatemala and Belize. He looked at the pieces and said they were authentic. And then asked “where was the shop I purchased the find?” He would go there on his next trip to San Pedro Sula to purchase the entire shoebox.

Later that same year, I took an archaeological tour of Peru. I first went to Iquitos on my own and by boat down the Amazon to the Napo and then up the Napo River for a bit to reach a jungle lodge where I spent a few days. When I returned to Iquitos, I joined the tour and we flew to the north coast of Peru to Chiclayo. At our first ruin we had to walk about a kilometer or two from the parking area to reach the ruins. As we were walking, I noticed we were walking across a field of shards. Thousands of them, covering the field in all directions as far as I could see. You couldn’t walk without stepping on them. I asked our guide about this and she told me that the north coast pyramids were built of adobe or dried mud/clay. Since this area has almost zero annual rainfall, the pyramids should last forever. And they probably would except for every hundred years or so, a huge rainstorm (literally a hundred-year storm) comes through and dissolves a bit more of the pyramids. And washes down more shards to the plain below it. The guide said all the shards were out of context and of no value to the archaeologists because they couldn’t learn anything from a single piece without knowing where it came from and what had been next to it.

At each site in Peru that we stopped, I found shards. Near Trujillo, near Cusco, along the Urubamba, even at the top of Machu Picchu. I never knew if they were broken, contemporary pots that had been brought into the sites as fill for the paths or had been there for hundreds of years waiting to be found. Once my eye knew what to look for, the shards magically appeared.

In Mexico, when I went to Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Ek Balam, Yaxunah, Muyil, Calakmul, Tonina, Palenque, Bonampak, Yaxchilan, Dzibilchaltun and other smaller and out-of-the-way places, I saw shards. In caves, caverns and around cenotes, I saw them. In my gardens in Valladolid, at the Casa Hamaca, when I dig to plant some flowers, I come across shards. From 10 years ago? Or a thousand? Who knows.

Last week one of my masons brought something to show me. He lives in a small village near Valladolid and farms a small milpa. He had completed this year’s slash and burn and discovered something curious in the ashes. The left forearm of a statue or an idol made of fired clay. Hollow, with the hand gripping an undefined something…like a ball, perhaps? And with a heavy bracelets encircling the wrist. Half of the forearm was fire-blackened, the other half terra cotta color with, maybe, suggestions of paint or color. Roberto was pretty proud of his find, as he should be. But now he has gone back to look for the rest of the statue. Based on my calculations (read: best guess) the full statue might be 12 to 14 inches in height. I hope he finds it; I’d love to see it.


The forearm Roberto found in his milpa


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On of the reasons that Valladolid first grabbed me was the age of things. The antiquity and the history of so many of the colonial buildings blew me away. And underlying the colonial history was the realization that the Mayan people had lived here for a very long time before the Spanish came. As I drive or walk anywhere in town, I sometimes complain to myself that the streets and the sidewalks are too narrow. And then I remember that the streets were built to accommodate horses, carriages and carts not our modern automobiles, busses and trucks. They were built just right for the horses and still seem perfect for bicycles, tricycles and motor scooters. But not for driving. Not for walking. Of course, in colonial times the only people who had to walk were indios and they sure didn’t need sidewalks…they could walk in the gutters. No proper Spanish lady or gentleman ever had to worry about such a base endeavor as walking in the street! When sidewalks were finally put in to allow people on foot to get around without getting run over, there wasn’t a lot of room for them since virtually all the houses were built right to the street. So the width of the streets became even narrower.

The Spanish architecture that was brought here in the 16th century had been strongly influenced by the Moors who ruled Spain for almost 1,000 years…they last of the Moors were defeated at almost exactly the same time Columbus “discovered” the Americas. For all kinds of reasons, the Moors built a very plain façade facing outward, with either a high wall or buildings (or both) facing inward to a central courtyard. That’s where all the family life took place…in the courtyard. The horses were stabled there, the chickens roosted there, the family smithy might be there, the kitchens and laundries were there. There might be fruit, vegetable and herb gardens. And maybe a fountain or some reflecting pools for cooling. When I was about 15 years old, I visited Toledo, Spain, with my parents (we lived in Madrid for two years in the mid ‘50s). One of the few things that I can really remember of that excursion was visiting the house of El Greco, the artist and painter. I remember thinking how cool it would be to live in a house like his…an open courtyard surrounded by inward facing rooms…and to make it even cooler, many of the structures were two stories with an open balcony and walkway wrapping around much of the courtyard. His house followed the Moorish style to the “t”. Partly because of the Moorish influence, Spain and Portugal were so different, so foreign and so strange that, until the European Union, people said that Europe stopped at the Pyrenees. Spain and Portugal are part of Europe now and not nearly so interesting.

It seems if I have always liked old things, antique things, ancient things. And, now that I am an antique, I seem to like them even more. I like the patina of age. The side of a three or four hundred-year-old building with exposed layers of multiple colors of paint. When you get up close, you can see the demarcation lines of the various layers, but if you step back a few feet, the wall becomes an abstract mural. It’s amazing; the most humble wall or building transforming that way. I was waiting in the car for my wife a week ago and was looking at a stone wall (it was too high to be called a fence). Many years ago it had been painted yellow (maybe the wall owner was originally from Izamal where the entire town is painted yellow), and then repainted yellow and repainted again. I could see the multiple layers and the richness of color…of the play of light and shadow.

So that’s part of the reason that I am here in Valladolid…because it’s old. I like it that way. But do the people who live here? Do the people who grew up here like it that way? Or do they just think that things are sort of run-down? Sort of shabby? Sort of old? That some of the old building, basically abandoned homes that have turned into overgrown ruins, should be torn down and something nice and modern should be built there…like a Seven-Eleven or something. Torn down even though some of the walls are almost a yard thick, built of stone and 400 + years old. I can’t answer that question, but I do know the laws say you can’t change the exterior of buildings of a certain age. You can put new windows and doors in the original openings, you can paint the building a different color, but that’s about it. From the outside, things must remain the same. That’s good for a lot of people. That’s good for the cultural and architectural heritage of the city. It’s good for the preservation of the past.

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What all brings this to my mind is the church across the street from me. The San Juan Church. The guidebooks don’t give an age for the church because, I believe, the early records were lost in one of the many conflicts that involved the city. I have heard the story that the church is from the 1600s. It could well be. It sure is old. Old and charming. With pigeons and buzzards sitting on tops of both steeples each morning waiting for the first warming rays of the sun. I used the word patina before; this church has a patina. I really like patina. I like the green patina of corroded copper, for instance, more than I like polished copper. But what I call the beauty of patina, some might think is just grimy and dirty and grubby. And should be cleaned up and made to look young and fresh and new again. There is something to be said for that. I wish that I could be made young and fresh and new again. Well, I can’t…but the building can. And that’s what’s happening with the San Juan Church. It’s being restored to its original glory and shininess and brightness and cleanliness. The stones are being re-pointed and scrubbed. The cleaned part of the building seems to glow now. In contrast, the un-refurbished part is still covered with bird droppings. It has shrubs and small trees growing in tiny pockets of wind-deposited soil, high up of the ground. It has character. It has patina. But I’m slowly of getting used to the idea of the “new“ church. But, for today, at least, there is still part of the character left. Still some of the patina. And there is always the rest of Valladolid. Almost the entire historic district still has the patina of antiquity. It still lives in a time warp. It will be a long time coming before that changes, I think.

PS a friend set up a MySpace page for Casa Hamaca at www.myspace.com/casahamaca. Check it out and add yourself as a friend and help get the word out about Casa Hamaca.




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When I just typed in Denis Larsen the results were (on Google) about 1,470,000. I thought that was too many to look through this afternoon. So I ran the search again with quote marks around the two names, like this “Denis Larsen.” That returned a more manageable number: 329. And I was at the top of the list! Hurray. Makes one feel good to be recognized and known. It turns out that there are a number of other people named Denis Larsen or some variation like Dennis Larsen, Dennis Larson or Denis Larson. There is a General in the US Air Force, a rock musician and a hockey player (I don’t think they are all the same person). I started scanning the results. They were all pretty much related to one of five endeavors of mine that have websites. But then came some surprises.

1. The Casa Hamaca website and various links to the casa including personal posts to other sites letting them know about the casa. The only surprises here were a few comments that I had left on some different blogs or message boards…some of them some time ago. So long ago that I had forgotten I had posted the comments. I don’t think I said anything to offend anyone.
http://www.casahamaca.com


2. My massage therapy business, aNeed2Heal, LLC. There were multiple pages from the website itself. And a surprising number of “find a massage therapist” type listings, many of them with addresses a number of years old. There were also some links to some writing about massage that I have had published on other websites (ie: www.mexconnect.com). No real surprises here either.
http://www.aneed2heal.com


3. The volunteer work that I do with Mano Amiga in the north of Mexico as well as in the Yucatan.
http://www.manoamiga.net

4. And a goofy site, Dalisllama that I write. It contains some of my travel writing on Peru, Belize, Isla Mujeres and the Yucatan as well as some links that I find funny, interesting or just curious. No real surprises here either.
http://www.dalisllama.com


5. Easy Isla…a site about Isla Mujeres that I started almost 7 years ago and just got bored with. Maybe some day I will revive it.
http://www.easyisla.com


6. Then the surprises started. I came across my name at xxxxxxxxx.com. I registered with them some years ago for a free listing and stopped using the service as soon as I realized that all they wanted was money and they weren’t shy about asking for it. They list a couple of schools that I attended. But I had forgotten the site even existed.

7. More surprisingly, I came across a number of sites that listed contributions of money or time that I had made to churches, summer camps, and political campaigns and to the Mayan Research Program (reviewed at http://www.Dalisllama.com). I didn’t realize that these details of my life would ever see the light of day. Nor did I think it anyones business where I donated time or money. But there it is.


8. Then I came across a few real surprises. An article in Spanish published of news of the state of Quintana Roo, about a volunteer project of audiologists on Isla Mujeres that I coordinated.
http://www.novenet.com.mx/seccion.php?i ... ] http://www.novenet.com.mx/seccion.php?i ... amp;y=2007[/url]


9. A couple of different references to a series of business meetings in late 1971 and early 1972 (way before the internet was born) between the R&D folks at Phillip Morris, the cigarette makers, and myself, my ex-wife and a friend for whom we were pretending to work for. We (my ex and I) were freelancing for him to develop new consumer smoking products. Right after this project, my ex and I agreed never to work again in tobacco products. And neither of us ever did. This stuff got on line, I think, because of suits from consumer interest groups to examine how the tobacco industry seduced people to smoke.
http://ltdlimages.library.ucsf.edu/imag ... h78e00.pdf
http://tobaccodocuments.org/landman/202 ... -7773.html

10. A reference from the Seti (seekers of life on other planets) project. They had a program (maybe still do for all I know) that borrowed your computer when you were not actively using it to analyze signals from outer space. They listed how many total hours of computer time I donated as well as the average length of a computer session. Wow. I really had forgotten about doing that.
http://seticlassic.ssl.berkeley.edu/cla ... 51731.html

11. In 1954, when I was 14 years old and living in Urbana, Illinois and attending University High School, I spent the better part of one summer working for a research project for the University of Illinois. It was a study of the thiamine requirement of teenaged boys that finally was presented as a paper a few years later and published in The Journal of Nutrition. They must have put their archives online.
http://jn.nutrition.org/cgi/reprint/66/2/173.pdf


Lots of bits and pieces of my life here. So I ran a search on Yahoo to see what happened there. 143 results for “Denis Larsen”, including a Linkin listing that I had also forgotten. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/4a4/8a7.

That got me wondering about other aspects of my life that hadn’t shown up on the web. I wrote, edited and published a monthly newsletter on Japanese Woodblock Prints for two years in the early 1980…before desktop publishing or personal computers. I did this every month in my basement on a top-of-the-line IBM Correcting Selectric. And then cut and pasted the entire issue. I also kept a database of some 3,000 individual Japanese prints (ukiyo-e in Japanese) on 3 x 5 cards. I tracked their description, artist’s signature, printer’s signature or seal, sale prices, condition, color, impression, location of sale, etc. After I had done this for a few months, I asked a neighbor who had just purchased a large IBM computer if they could put my database into the computer and maintain it. She answered that her database program could not handle the information. So I continued by hand. And then a few years later came the home computer revolution. A search on “Japanese Woodblock Print Dealer and Collectors Newsletter” on Google returned “no results”…same as Yahoo.

I often use the online name of xxxxxxxxx. A Google search turned up 38 results…everything from YouTube video postings to dumb questions or comments that I had posted all over the net. Yahoo surprised me with 1,760 results. They were mostly the same kind of thing that Google returned along with an at least one online auction bid that I had made a few years ago. There does seem to at least one other person who goes by the name of xxxxxxxxxx, but he is not too active on the net.

Last week, Ancestry.com announced that they have just put a huge database of US military records on line. I quickly found my uncle and my grandfather, his brother and my great grandfather…but could not find my father since he was in the Navy in WWII. The current records are only for the US Army. I was in ROTC, but never served in the military so my name turned up zip.

The net/net on the net is that there is a lot of information out there on anyone who has any kind of online presence. And some of it just won’t go away. I recently read about services that attempt to clean up your web records and delete embarrassing questions, comments or whatever. Politicians and top business people seem to be the biggest users of these services. I sure don’t.
However, I did go back through the article and changed a few things to make it a little more challenging to do an identity theft. !

Vanity thy name is Denis. That's Denis with one "n". and Larsen, with an "e", not Larson.

What are your experiences with this kind of information about yourself?

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