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Archaeologist Jonathan Kaplan tries to spend
as much time as possible exploring Chocolá,
a huge Maya site in southern Guatemala dating
from 1200 B.C.E. So far his team has
mapped more than 60 mounds, identified
dozens of monuments, and found signs of the
emergence of Maya civilization, including
large, sophisticated waterworks that likely
required social organization to build.
But today, instead of digging, Kaplan is
lunching with the mayor of a municipality
that includes the impoverished town of
Chocolá. Kaplan, a research associate with
the Museum of New Mexico’s Office of
Archaeological Studies in Santa Fe, is trying
to enlist the mayor’s support for a land swap
that would give farmers land of no archaeological
value in exchange for land that holds
Maya ruins. The local people he’s trying to
help, many of them descended from the
ancient Maya, are “clinging by their fingers to
survival,” says Kaplan. So, working with a
Guatemalan archaeologist, he has established
a trash-removal service, hired an environmental
scientist to help improve the drinking
water, and developed plans for two museums
to attract tourists.
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It takes a village. In Guatemala’s Mirador Basin, Richard Hansen (in white cap and shirt, center) directs scores of trained local workers in restoring an ancient Maya city. |
Kaplan and others are in the vanguard of a
movement called community archaeology.
From Africa to Uzbekistan, researchers are
trying to boost local people’s quality of life in
order to preserve the relics of their ancestors.
In the Maya region, the situation is urgent; the
vestiges of the ancient Maya may be
destroyed in 5 to 10 years unless something is
done to curb looting, logging, poaching, and
oil exploration, says Richard Hansen, president
of the Foundation for Anthropological
Research & Environmental Studies and an
archaeologist at Idaho State University in
Pocatello. Hansen, Kaplan, and others are
using archaeology as an engine for development,
driving associated tourism and education
projects. The resultant intertwining of
research and development is such that “I cannot
accomplish the one without the other,”
says Kaplan, “because poverty is preventing
the people from attending to the ancient
remains in a responsible fashion.”
It wasn’t always that way. Until fairly
recently, Maya researchers were solely
focused on the hunt for “stones and bones,”
says Hansen. Archaeologist Arthur
Demarest of Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, Tennessee, says researchers often
excavated a site with the help of local workers,
only to abandon them when the project
ended. Those who lost their income often
resorted to looting and slash-and-burn agriculture
to survive. “In the wake of every
archaeological project is an economic and
social disaster,” says Demarest.
He offers one of his own projects as an
example of what not to do. After employing
about 300 people in the early 1990s at several
sites in the Petén, the vast tropical forest in
northern Guatemala, Demarest left the government
with a continuing development plan
for the region, much of it federal land. But the
federal government brought in outsiders to
implement it. Desperate at having lost their
jobs, the local people plundered the sites.
“From that, I learned a lot of lessons,”
Demarest says. “Archaeology transforms a
region.” In his view, archaeologists themselves
must take responsibility for helping
the locals succeed. “The days of Indiana
Jones, when archaeologists could go to a
place, excavate, and then leave without
concern about the impact that their actions
are having on the people in the area, are
gone,” he has said.
Today, Demarest embraces this responsibility
as he excavates part of the great trade
route that ran through much of the Maya
region, including along the Pasión River and
through Cancuen, an ancient city in central
Guatemala. He says his project is successful
because it operates “bottom up—we’re working
through the village.” Using ethnographic
studies of the Maya people and working with
leaders from several villages, Demarest
designed a research and community development
plan that enables the local people, rather
than outsiders, to serve as custodians
of their own heritage.
The communities choose projects—
archaeology, restoration,
ecotourism, etc.—and
run them with the guidance of
experts, earning more than
they would by farming.
One successful enterprise is
a boat service, run by the Maya,
that ferries tourists
down the Pasión River
from the village of La
Union to Cancuen,
now a national park.
In addition to generating
revenue, the service
attracted a variety
of agencies that provided
potable water,
electricity, and school
improvements to La
Union. The World
Bank cited the boat service as one of the 10
most innovative rural development projects in
the world in 2003.
Demarest also helped establish a visitor
center, an inn, a guide service, and a campground
at the park’s entrance. Three nearby
villages collaboratively manage these operations,
and the profits pay for water systems,
school expansions, and medical supplies.
“The only way these things are going to succeed
is if it’s theirs,” says Demarest, who has
raised nearly $5 million for community
development at Cancuen. Last year, he
became the first U.S. citizen to be awarded
the National Order of Cultural Patrimony by
the Guatemalan government.
Other archaeologists are trying to
achieve similar results in their own field
areas. Hansen is exploring the origins, the
cultural and ecological dynamics, and the
collapse of the Preclassic Maya (circa 2000
B.C.E. to 250 C.E.) in the Mirador Basin.
His project has a budget of $1.2 million,
with about $400,000 going to development
and $800,000 to archaeology. He raised
roughly half of the funds from the Global
Heritage Fund, a nonprofit organization that
helps preserve cultural heritage sites in
developing countries. The project employs
more than 200 people who earn above-average
wages while getting training; Hansen’s
team has also installed a new water system
and bought 40 computers to boost locals’
computer skills.
Looting in the basin has been devastating
in the past, so Hansen has hired 27 guards—
most of them former looters. They make good
guards, he says, “because they know the
tricks of the trade.” The project has instilled
“a sense of identity” in some residents,
although Hansen acknowledges that others
continue to loot. “It is a long battle to win the
hearts and minds of these people,” he says.
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Learning to lead. Guatemalans trained by Arthur Demarest (above) lead tours and carve stone miniatures of ancient monuments (left).
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Although both Demarest and Hansen have won generous grants for their work,
they agree that finding funding for community
archaeology is “horrific,” as Hansen
puts it. Kaplan makes do with about
$130,000 each year for his “terribly underfunded”
project, although his ideal would
be about $800,000. Traditional funders,
such as the U.S. National Science Foundation
(NSF), pay for research but not community
development, says Demarest. NSF,
with its modest budget of $5 million to $6
million, is most interested in the “intellectual
merit” of a project, agrees archaeology
program director John Yellen, although he
adds that the foundation does consider
“broader impacts,” including community
development. Demarest, who is financed by
some 20 organizations including the United
States Agency for International Development
and the Solar Foundation, says a big
budget is a must for community projects:
“You’ve got to have about $400,000 a season
to do ethical archaeology.”
But other researchers say it’s possible to
run such projects without big budgets.
Archaeologist Anabel Ford of the University
of California, Santa Barbara, who has been
practicing small-scale community archaeology
while studying land-use patterns at a
large site called El Pilar on the Belize-
Guatemala border since 1983, says that she
can achieve her community development
goals for as little as $12,000 a year. “I actually
think it’s not about tons of money,” she says.
“It’s about consistency.”
Ford operates on an annual budget of
$30,000 to $75,000, with funding sources
ranging from the Ford and MacArthur
Foundations to her own pocket. Within El
Pilar’s lush tropical forest are numerous
temples and other buildings
that stand as high as 22
meters. Over the years, Ford
has built a cultural center and
a caretaker house, and El
Pilar now attracts hundreds
of ecotourists annually. Ford
started an annual festival to
celebrate cultural traditions
and foster community involvement,
and she’s organizing a
women’s collective to sell local
crafts. “We’ve built the first
infrastructure at El Pilar since
1000 [C.E.],” she says.
Whether they operate with
big money or on the cheap,
community archaeologists
face a delicate juggling act
between development and
research. Ford believes her
academic career has suffered
because of the time and effort
she’s invested in development projects. “I
would have written much more substantive
work on my research at El Pilar,” she says,
lamenting that she has yet to finish a book
about her work. Kaplan and Demarest say
that they spend about half their time on
community development, leaving only half
for archaeology.
As impressive and well-intentioned as
these and other community archaeology projects
seem, at least a few researchers are concerned
about unintended consequences. “If
you don’t understand the local politics, you
can really do damage,” says Arlen Chase of
the University of Central Florida in Orlando,
who has investigated Caracol, a major Maya
site in Belize, since 1984. It’s difficult to
determine just what archaeologists owe the
community they work in, he adds. “This is a
new endeavor, and we’re learning how best to
do it,” agrees archaeologist Anne Pyburn,
outgoing chair of the Ethics Committee of the
American Anthropological Association.
Despite these concerns, Hansen and his
colleagues seem convinced that they’re
making progress. Guatemalans who were
“dedicated to looting and destroying these
sites,” Hansen says, are “now dedicated to
preserving them.” – MICHAEL BAWAYA, Michael Bawaya is the editor of American Archaeology.
Please direct media inquiries to:
GHF Press press@globalheritagefund.org
or (650) 325 7520
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