There are no rivers on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. The land is flat and dry and dusty. The soil is only a few feet deep, a thin layer of arable land over a shelf of hard limestone. The jungle that covers the land is made up of thin-leafed trees and thorny bushes that turn yellow in the long summer.
There are no rivers, but there is water hidden deep beneath the limestone. Here and there, the stone has cracked and cool water from beneath the earth has reached the surface and formed a pool.
The Maya called such pools ts’not – an abrupt, angular sort of a word. The Spanish conquerors who came to the Yucatán softened the word. Cenotes, they called these ancient wells. Whatever the name, the water is cold; the pools are deep.
Hidden beneath the water are fragments of the old Mayan civilization: broken pieces of pottery, figurines, jade ornaments, and bits of bone – sometimes human bone. In the mythos of the Maya, the cenotes were places of power belonging to the Chaacob, the gods who come from the world’s four corners to bring the rain.
Dzibilchaltún, the oldest city on the Yucatán peninsula, was built around a cenote known as Xlacah. By Mayan reckoning, people settled in this place in the ninth katun. By the Christian calendar, that is about one thousand years before the death of Christ. But Christian reckoning seems out of place here. Despite the efforts of Spanish friars, Christianity sits very lightly on the land.
The ruins of Dzibilchaltún cover over twenty square miles. Only the central area has been mapped. One structure, a box-shaped building on a high platform, has been rebuilt. Archaeologists call this building the Temple of the Seven Dolls because seven doll-sized ceramic figures were found buried in its floor. Archaeologists do not know what the ancient Maya called the building, nor what the Maya did in this temple.
The Temple of the Seven Dolls offers the best view of the surrounding area – a monotonous expanse of thirsty trees and scrubby bushes. Near the Temple of the Seven Dolls, the jungle has been cleared away, and mounds of rock rise from the flat land. Fragments of walls and sections of white limestone causeways are barely visible through the grass and soil. The view would be bleak were it not for the enormous sky, an unbroken expanse of relentless blue.
Do not look for revelations in the ancient ruins. You will find here only what you bring: bits of memory, wisps of the past as thin as clouds in the summer, fragments of stone that are carved with symbols that sometimes almost make sense.
1
Elizabeth Butler
‘I dig through ancient trash,’ I told the elegantly groomed young woman who had been sent by a popular women’s magazine to write a short article on my work. ‘I grub in the dirt, that’s what I do. I dig up dead Indians. Archaeologists are really no better than scavengers, sifting through the garbage that people left behind when they died, moved on, built a new house, a new town, a new temple. We’re garbage collectors really. Is that clear?’ The sleek young woman’s smile faltered, but she bravely continued the interview.
That was in Berkeley, just after the publication of my last book, but the memory of the interview lingered with me. I pitied the reporter and the photographer who accompanied her. It was so obvious that they did not know what to do with me.
I am an old woman. My hair is gray and brown – the color of the limestone monuments raised by the Maya one thousand years ago. My face has weathered through the years – the sun has etched wrinkles around the eyes, the wind has carved lines. At age fifty-one, I am a troublesome old woman.
My name is Elizabeth Butler; my friends and students call me Liz. The University of California at Berkeley lists me as a lecturer and field archaeologist, but in actuality I am a mole, a scavenger, a garbage collector. I find it somewhat surprising, though gratifying, that I have managed to make my living in such a strange occupation.
Often, I argue with other people who grub in the dirt. I have a reputation for asking too many embarrassing questions at conferences where everyone presents their findings. I have always enjoyed asking embarrassing questions.
Sometimes, much to the dismay of my fellow academics, I write books about my activities and the activities of my colleagues. In general, I believe that my fellow garbage collectors regard my work as suspect because it has become quite popular. Popularity is not the mark of a properly rigorous academic work. I believe that their distrust of my work reflects a distrust of me. My work smacks of speculation; I tell stories about the people who inhabited the ancient ruins – and my colleagues do not care for my tales. In academic circles, I linger on the fringes where the warmth of the fire never reaches, an irreverent outsider, a loner who prefers fieldwork to the university and general readership to academic journals.
But then, the popularizers don’t like me either. I gave that reporter trouble, I know. I talked about dirt and potsherds when she wanted to hear about romance and adventure. And the photographer – a young man who was more accustomed to fashion-plate beauties than to weatherworn archaeologists – did not know how to picture the crags and fissures of my face. He kept positioning me in one place, then in another. In the end, he took photographs of my hands: pointing out the pattern on a potsherd, holding a jade earring, demonstrating how to use a mano and metate, the mortar and pestle with which the Maya grind corn.
My hands tell more of my history than my face. They are tanned and wrinkled and I can trace the paths of veins along their backs. The nails are short and hard, like the claws of some digging animal, and the wrists are marked with vertical white scars, a permanent record of my attempt to escape my former husband and the world in the most drastic way possible. The magazine photographer was careful to position my hands so that the scars did not show.
I believe that the reporter who interviewed me expected tales of tombs, gold, and glory. I told her about heat, disease, and insect bites. I described the time that my jeep broke an axle fifty miles from anywhere, the time that all my graduate students had diarrhea simultaneously, the time that the local municipality stole half my workmen to work on a local road. ‘Picture postcards never show the bugs,’ I told her. ‘Stinging ants, wasps, fleas, roaches the size of your hand. Postcards never show the heat.’
I don’t think that I told her what she wanted to hear, but I enjoyed myself. I don’t think that she believed all my stories. I think she still believes that archaeologists wear white pith helmets and find treasure each day before breakfast. She asked me why, if conditions were as horrible as I described, why I would ever go on another dig. I remember that she smiled when she asked me, expecting me to talk about the excitement of discovery, the thrill of uncovering lost civilizations. Why do I do it?
‘I’m crazy,’ I said. I don’t think she believed me.
It was three weeks into the field season at Dzibilchaltún that Tony, Salvador, and I held a council of war. We sat at a folding table at one edge of the central plaza, an area of hard-packed dirt surrounded by mud-and-wattle huts. The plaza served as dining hall, classroom, meeting place, and, at that moment, conference room. Dinner was over and we lingered over coffee laced with aguardiente, a potent local brandy.
The situation was this. We had thirty men to do a job that would be difficult with twice that number. Our budget was tight; our time was limited. We had been at work for three weeks out of our allotted eight. So far our luck had been nonexistent. And the municipality had just commandeered ten of our workmen to patch potholes in the road between Mérida and Progreso. In the Yucatán, the season for road building coincides with the season for excavation, a brief period in the spring before the rains come. In five weeks – sooner if our luck was bad – the rains would come and our work would end.