Soon after Bryan Dalton stepped off the plane from the United States for field school in Nicaragua, the junior archaeology major was picked up from the airport and whisked away to save an archaeological site on the brink of destruction.
Dalton and fellow George Mason University student Jack Bolger, a film and video studies major, had actually come to Nicaragua to work on another, unrelated archaeology dig. But George Mason anthropology professor Justin Lowry had the students help with an emergency instead.
It was June in the Central American country, and heavy tropical rains had caused a flood at the Acahualinca Museum. The museum was built around the site of 2,100-year-old footprints encased in volcanic ash—one of the oldest findings of its kind in the New World.
“The wall between the site and the earth failed. It just poured mud and sand and dirt in there to the point that you wouldn’t have even known [the site] was there,” Dalton said.
“The site was on national news and on almost every channel due to the wall falling,” said Lowry.
The group from Mason worked alongside students from Plymouth State University, who’d also come to Nicaragua with Lowry, to re-excavate the site.
“The students immediately got conservation experience. When you excavate, you have to be extremely careful,” Lowry said. He explained that other sets of ancient footprints discovered in the 1800s, but later forgotten, were re-discovered during project, thanks to the students’ work.
After completing their critical mission at Acahualinca, the students traveled to their original destination—Chiquilistagua, where Lowry runs a field school. They worked there for about three weeks, at a site that hadn’t been visited since the 1990s.
A main focus of the Chiquilistagua project was to uncover evidence of long-distance trade routes from Lower Central America and possibly South America into Mexico, where ancient peoples could have engaged in trading with the Mayans.
“This was my first chance to taste what actual field work was like,” said Dalton, the only archaeology major from Mason on the trip.
The site extended onto personal property and included excavating people’s backyards, which is why a part of the site is called “Edgar’s Bean Field.”
Digging holes under the hot sun yielded some interesting finds for the students, including a rounded and potentially elongated feature in the ground that could possibly be a funeral plot. But because of time constraints, the group left this discovery for a future, more in-depth excavation to determine what it actually is.
The team also uncovered an animal bone, which could be connected to a possible ritual sacrifice, Lowry said.
The mayor of Managua, the city where the site is located, hosted an awards ceremony for those who helped with the Acahualinca Museum site recovery, which is still in the works.
“A lot of good things came out of it,” Lowry said. “This allowed us to work together with the Nicaragua archaeologists, and the students got to do something they never would have done.”