Page <#number#> of <#numberOfPages#>
Previous Page     Next Page        Smaller fonts | Larger fonts     com.yudu.plainText.returnToFlash

Brent Woodfill, standing in front of the ruins of a 150-year-old hacienda in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, plans to return to the area as often as he can.

Brent Woodfill remembers the first book he read – one about dinosaurs. He thought he would become a paleontologist.

But sitting in his fourth-grade classroom studying Pompeii, the Roman city that was buried after a volcanic eruption, he had a realization.

“I realized you could actually dig up people, and not just dinosaurs,” said Woodfill, an assistant professor of anthropology.

In 2018, he “dug up” something else: a collection of historic Maya artifacts dating more than 1,200 years old, likely the largest figurine workshop yet encountered in the Maya world.

Woodfill has spent years working on dig sites at the southern edge of the Maya lowlands. An acquaintance who also happens to be the regional inspector of monuments for the city of Coban, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, called Woodfill to examine the giant figurine workshop, which includes hundreds of beautiful molds and figurines featuring an elaborate Maya style believed to have been traded throughout the northern highlands and lowlands.

dig sites in several other Classic cities and saltworks in the Guatemalan Highlands and the Lacandon Forest in Chiapas, Mexico. “Science Magazine” traveled with him and profiled his journey in its fall edition.

‘FELL IN LOVE’

Woodfill’s uncle took him on a tour of his first dig site at age 13. At 16, he began participating in field schools, short- term credit programs that provide students with practical archaeological training.

“Archaeology, as a field science, is hard to learn in class,” he explained. “You have to be very meticulous. You have to stop, dig around it, draw it, photograph it. Te heat, humidity and acidic soil can mean the bones are so very fragile.”

As a college student, he took a course about the Yucatan Peninsula and traveled there.

“I fell in love with the first dig site that I visited [there],” he said. “I decided I would learn Spanish and stay in the Maya world.”

From there, he spent time networking at a field school in Belize, half the time spent digging up the city of Baking Pot in the Maya River Valley, the other half mapping and studying caves. He then earned a master’s and Ph.D. and moved to Guatemala, where he learned the Q’eqchi’ language, spoken by most of the inhabitants of the research site.

In 2009, he honed in on Salinas de Los Nueve Cerros (“Saltworks of Nine Hills”), a major city and the only non- coastal salt source in the Maya lowlands. It’s one of the few cities to have survived past the Classic Collapse due to the control of this powerful resource.

‘ARCHAEOLOGY IS COMMUNITY RELATIONS’

From Science 2019: Vol. 365, pp. 966-970, DOI: 10.1126/science.365.6457.966. Photo credit: Lizzie Wade/Science Reprinted with permission from AAAS. 2

DIGGING FOR MEANING

These Maya artifacts are part of a collection that Woodfill discovered in 2018.

“It looks like it was all just a single, relatively short occupation,” Woodfill explained, “but since the occupation spans both sides of the Classic Maya Collapse, it looks like the people from this town continued to be important and might have actually peaked after a lot of the lowland cities.”

Te National Science Foundation awarded him a grant to salvage, map and excavate the remaining artifacts.

Tis past summer, Woodfill returned to the site to oversee the research. He and his wife, Ginny, also made stops at

In addition to teaching, Woodfill is contemplating his next book. He’s also researching approximately six dig sites.

“It is actually not the moment of discovery, but the moment of understanding, when things snap together,” he said of his favorite archaeology moment. “…When I’m sitting later in a coffeehouse, trying to figure out what was going on in relation within the cities, how people conceived of the environment.

“…I am an American who brings a fair amount of access, money and resources. I can’t necessarily make the world a better place, but I can make the [local] people’s lives a little bit better. Instead of giving people what I think they need, I can use press and resources, and hopefully funnel it into training for the locals so they have better ways to raise money and gain connections, knowledge and experience. Tat’s where I get the most meaning.”

3

Previous arrowPrevious Page     Next PageNext arrow        Smaller fonts | Larger fonts     com.yudu.plainText.returnToFlash
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13