A couple of decades ago, I found myself conducting Aztec archaeology: sitting on a hand-hewn limestone block, baking under a Mexican sun and writing notes. It has been said that you can always tell an archaeologist by his or her notes. Archaeology is a supremely destructive science, requiring that you dig up and dismantle every little piece of the past. If you don’t keep careful and detailed notes of your disassembly process, you are destroying the past without recording it. I have always been a fanatic about notes, and in addition to a list of recovered artifacts and excavation notes, I detail everything from the weather of the day to the amount of joking going on among the crew. You never know what’s going to mean something in the future, or how you might have your memory jogged.
How Did I Get Here?
What I, a great leaping unknown and mostly Midwestern US archaeologist, was doing in Mexico was sort of an accident. A friend of my master’s thesis adviser was planning a year-long excavation in the state of Morelos, in central Mexico. The principal investigator had five student archaeologists lined up well ahead of time: two Mexicans and three US citizens. Unfortunately one of the Americans discovered he would be unable to get down there for the first half-year. I, having taken a couple of courses in Mesoamerican archaeology, boasting some smattering of Spanish, and most importantly, being the advisee of my adviser, was tapped to fill in the six month position.
And when I say "smattering of Spanish" unfortunately I am being more than generous. I had had four years of high school French and 10 hours of college French before I’d taken my single semester of conversational Spanish. My Spanish was so French that in Mexico I passed for a French person (which is not necessarily a bad thing: n.b. to Latin American men—not all American girls are easy). On archaeological excavations in Mexico, all the labor is done by local residents, some of whom have decades of experience on archaeological sites. I inflicted my "Sprenich" on my poor Spanish-speaking crew for the six months I worked with them. After a few months, of course, either my Spanish improved, or their French did. Probably both.
Rural Aztec Community
The site we were working on was an Aztec period site, a Tlahuica (T’lah-WEE-kah) site, to be specific, and it was located about 150 kilometers south of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (Ten-osh-Teet-lawn), now known as Mexico City. The Tlahuicans had been minding their own business in this small town when the Aztecs came and put their big feet all over their government, around AD 1425 or so. The town had perhaps 100 houses in it, some bigger than others, and the houses were draped over a razor-thin upland between two steep barrancas, steep ravines, gorges really. One of the niftiest things about the site were the stone terraces that the Tlahuicans had built to maintain agricultural fields on the steep barranca slopes. There was also a big building for the big cheese and a priest's house; all in all, it was a pretty typical late post-classic period town.
So, anyway, there I was, a stranger in a strange land, measuring the nicely-hewn limestone foundation blocks and taking notes like mad while my crew continued to excavate in the interior of the house about 10 yards away. I was pretty involved in my work, waxing eloquent on the possibility that the blocks were actually borrowed Classic period limestone foundations, when Alejandro called my name. "Flaquita!" (That means "little skinny girl," I was, uh, thinner then).
"Que paso, Alejandro?" [Spanish: What’s up?]
"Hay huesos, Flaquita!" [Spanish: there’s a skeleton here.]
"Tenez saguaro?" [Sprenich: Are you sure?; Spanish: "Do you have any cactus?"]
The workmen laughed and chorused "Si, Kristina, tenemos los saguaros." (Sp.: Yes, Kristina, we’ve got cactus.")
