It Takes a Village… MRP’s relationship with local communities

By Faithe McCreery

Two summers ago, upon returning home from my first two sessions volunteering with the Maya Research Program, I couldn’t wait to meet up with an archaeology friend/schoolmate of mine who had also just returned from her first field school. We got together at a café just off campus to trade stories over coffee: me extolling on the adventure that was archaeology at Blue Creek, and my friend filling me in on the goings-on at her field school in highland Peru. All in all, our experiences had much in common. We’d both had a fantastic tic time, surrendering ourselves to the deep-seated and life-long love of archaeology. We’d both enjoyed the unpredictability of communal living, the joy of eating bagged lunches in the field, and the feeling of healthy exhaustion that follows a long day of good, hard work. But my friend shared something else that day, something that shocked me so much, I’ve never quite gotten over it. Apparently, the local people who lived near her program’s excavations were not at all happy with the archaeological field work that was going on there. In fact, they saw the archaeologists as such an encroachment on their community that at night they would come out to the site and remove datums, just to confuse operations. Now, I want to make it clear that my objective in writing this is not to criticize my friend or her field school, or to make any generalizations about archaeology in Peru or elsewhere. (In fact, I know archaeologists who have done great work in Peru –including many individuals from our very own MRP–without incident.)I clearly didn’t get the whole story there, I never will, and it’s not my place to judge someone else’s well-meaning actions. The point is, it was really disheartening for me to break the bubble of naiveté and to realize that there are places out there where archaeologists don’t have the best relationship with the surrounding community –because when it comes down to it, for MRP our relationship with the local community is vital.

Most of the land around Blue Creek is owned by Mennonites who migrated to Belize from Canada in the 1950s. (This can be quite a shock to newcomers, who don’t expect to hear Low German spoken around them in the midst of a Central American country!) While most Mennonite settlers were originally farmers, today the Mennonite community of Blue Creek has diversified; for example, Mennonite families own the Linda Vista shopping center and the Delicacy Café close to MRP’s base camp. There are two factions of Mennonites in northern Belize: the people who live in Blue Creek –who don’t particularly stand out in appearance and who use modern conveniences such as cars and the Internet– are less conservative than the people from the town of Shipyard, who dress in traditional clothing such as bonnets and plain dresses and travel via horse and buggy. The important issue here is that the Mennonites who live in and around Blue Creek have had ample time and opportunity to get to know the archaeologists of the Maya Research Program, since MRP has been operating in their community for over two decades now. MRP and the local Mennonites don’t see eye-to-eye on everything. The bulldozing of archaeological sites in the name of clearing pasture land, for one thing, is a major issue of contention, and it’s the reason MRP is working so hard to purchase sites such as Grey Fox which are in imminent danger of destruction. However, in my experience, the relationship between MRP-ers and the Mennonites of Blue Creek is pretty darned good. It’s a Mennonite woman, Margaret (the sweetest lady ever, by the way) who has been cooking meals for our rough, hungry throngs each summer over the past two decades. MRP staff and volunteers buy food and supplies from Mennonite-owned businesses, and in the process, we get to know the people there. (One retired MRP volunteer even makes it a habit to bring baby clothes down for a little boy who was adopted by a Mennonite family a couple of years ago and is just a bit younger than his own grandson.) Mennonite families show up to MRP barbeques, and our director’s son, Mikey, spends his days with the local Mennonite children while we’re all out in the field working. As Tom Guderjan put during one of his twilight lectures last summer, the Mennonite community doesn’t necessarily appreciate archaeology the way that we do, but they appreciate what it means to us. I think I can state confidently here that MRP is more of an addition to the community of Blue Creek, then, than an infringement.

MRP forges connections with Belizean individuals of Maya descent, as well (which only makes sense, right?). Some very nice Maya ladies help out Margaret in the kitchen, as well as working really hard every day to keep the MRP base camp clean and sanitary for us. (Like I said, we’re a rough crowd –and the tropical climate of Belize doesn’t do anyone any favors in terms of sanitation.) More familiar to most of us volunteers are the men who make the daily commute to Blue Creek from the nearby town of San Felipe, to help us excavate in the field. We often refer to our San Felipe friends affectionately as “the guys” –and every volunteer at MRP will tell you that we would be absolutely lost without them. The guys from San Felipe are the hardest workers I’ve ever met –and I know I’m not just speaking for myself here. They tell us about other jobs they’ve had in the past, or during other times of the year, at which they have to haul huge bags of rice or cut down sugar cane from the field, and it makes me feel weak just hearing about it. The physical strength that these guys bring to the field every day can really put a poor American student to shame. But we don’t hire the guys just to move dirt; they’re not manual laborers. As the team leader Tim likes to say during his first-night orientation talk with a new crew, the guys are some of the best archaeological excavators we’ll have the chance to meet. They have lived and worked around Maya sites for years, and they know what they are doing much better than we volunteers do. (One man, Pete, has worked for MRP for so long that his sons, Henry and Vernon, work with us too.) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to stop in the middle of my work, call over Henry or Vernon to take a look at what I’m doing, and ask, “What the heck is going on here?” Their knowledge of ancient architecture is uncanny, and they’re always glad to give advice or help steer a confused volunteer in the right direction. The guys also like to bring music players out to the field to help the work go by faster, and they often talk to us about their families and all kinds of other topics. (If you’re ever fortunate enough to work in the field with Ricky, I guarantee he’ll keep you laughing all day.) I could get all “anthropologist” here and talk about neocolonialism or the power structures of Western academia–but it’s the weekend, and I’m not being graded on this. So I’ll skip the diatribe. Just suffice it to say that, when you’re pulling someone’s own history and ancestors and material culture out of the ground, it feels pretty good to know that you have not just their consent, but their actual help. This is about conscience.

Which brings me back to the café just outside the University of Washington, where my friend shared the sad story of going to a field school that didn’t have an awesome relationship with the community. I know that this friend is a good person, and a good archaeologist. Her crew got some important work done, and they had a great time doing it. But after volunteering with the Maya Research Program, I just can’t imagine what it’s like to work in a community where you’re not particularly welcome. MRP has created collaborative relationships with local populations that last for decades –long before or after most volunteers will come and go. I take pride in the fact that when I put on my archaeology boots, I’m not stepping on the toes of the people around me. That kind of pride, if you ask me, is worth its weight in jade.

About the Author:

Faithe Miller McCreery will earn her B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Washington, Seattle in December 2012. She was the only kid in Mrs. Ehrhardt’s second-grade class to bring in small-scale replicas of Egyptian sarcophagi for show-and-tell –and since then her inner archaeology nerd has only intensified. Faithe has volunteered with the Maya Research Program for the past two summers and has plans to go back in 2013 as well. If you can catch her out of the classroom, there’s a good chance she’s working with archives and artifacts at Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. She has high hopes of earning her M.A. in Museology one of these days.