Day Fifty-Three, Antigua

On Tuesday the 18th of October we continued our look at the general history of Mesoamerican Archaeology to prepare us for delving into the details later. We talked about some of the more important sites in Mesoamerica and there influences on other sites. A lot of the first two days was more of a quick review for me, since I have taken classes on this before, and with our first readings in Susan Evans book it is very much an introduction.
In hieroglyphics class we started by comparing iconography and writing systems in Mesoamerica and Prof. Stuart emphasized that, to understand one you really have to study both. We sort of continued our look at the overview of the history of archaeology in this class, because it is all so tied together in these cultures. We looked at Ian Graham in particular, a "crazy English guy" who would go where no one else would in the dense jungles Mesoamerica and photograph the architecture and details of the sculptures, particularly the hieroglyphic scripts. from our discussion of Ian Graham we seguade into his "rediscovery" of El Mirador, and how that has led to the work that is being done there now. What was really very cool was when Prof. Stuart showed us that you can actually see the "super-highway" of El Mirador from Google maps!
At the end of class we did our second decipherment of the hieroglyphics on a sculpture of a dog from Tonina, which say "his dog" to the amusement of the class. But it is important to say that the Maya seemed to love to label all of there possessions, maybe to show status or to keep someone else from using their stuff, everything was labeled, from a bone instrument, to a cup, to a portrait of some mans favorite pet.

View of Antigua from Cerro de la Cruz

After classes I went back to my home stay for lunch. After two weeks of crazy rain storms here in Guatemala, which have done some serious damage to some of the small towns and villages, it was finally a beautiful sunny day outside, so the girls from my home stay and I decided to go hiking up Cerro de la Cruz, a famous lookout spot in Antigua. The hike was maybe 15mins once we got to the other side of Antigua, then we got one of the most beautiful views of Antigua I have yet seen. It was four of us that went up and we had a very good time, laughing and enjoying the weather.
After we cam back down we stopped at a cafe called "Cafe Sky" and sat on the roof deck continuing our view of Antigua; we even saw Fuego erupt/hiccup. After that we walked over to San Francisco and I showed them the church and Hermano Pedro's tomb. We also bought some candles to light at the church: two each, one red for love and one white for family. We had a lovely time and it was nice to finally get out of the house for a little bit.
That evening I continued my Spanish practice in my workbook and continued the readings for both the Casa Herrera classes.