New Year Update to Our Backers

The New Year got off to a quick start and continues at a breakneck pace! Anabel and I have been busy working on several aspects of our research at El Pilar, and we wanted to give you a quick update about our upcoming plans for the project. Here goes:

1) The Experiment funds arrived! I have not yet begun to buy equipment or use those funds for project expenses, but we are about to start moving forward with planning and logistics. I will start posting updates with pictures of equipment purchases and project itineraries as they happen.

2) Anabel and I have submitted two additional grant proposals for work at El Pilar. These proposals were sent to the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation to fund our long-term research plans. The grant from Experiment, which you helped make possible, will partially fund field work for this season, but the infrastructure and resources necessary to complete multiple field seasons and specialized laboratory analyses requires substantially more support. We spent a great deal of time and effort from November through January refining our case for that support, and we hope this will translate into the kind of success we had here.

3) Anabel and I have also submitted a paper on the history of research at El Pilar for publication in Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology, as well as our final field report from the 2016 season to the Institute of Archaeology, Belize. I would like to upload that field report here and will check with the government authorities about permission to do so. I also submitted a paper to Research Reports in Belizean Archaeology on a facet of my dissertation research at Cahal Pech, which is a smaller site southeast of El Pilar.

4) Anabel has been sending me chunks of data from her earlier work at El Pilar, and I'm just now getting some free time to play with them. I've also been looking at our survey data from last summer and have noticed some interesting relationships between artificial structures and natural features in the swamp. I'm looking into ways to test the strengths of apparently different spatial patterns and will provide updates as this work progresses.

5) We are presenting a paper on the early occupation of El Pilar -- Middle Preclassic, ~ 800 - 400 B.C. -- at this year's meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, British Columbia. The conference runs from March 29 - April 2, and our paper will be in an afternoon session titled "Structure and Space in Maya Sites" on Friday, March 31. We invite anyone who is interested to come to the talk and/or have a chat with us at the conference.

6) We are looking to begin fieldwork in mid-to-late April but do not yet have firm dates. Anabel is currently in Belize working out logistical matters, and we should have a more definite time-frame in the near future. We will keep you updated on that as well.

I think that's about it, for now. We will post more project updates and new research notes as we get closer to the start of fieldwork and begin finalizing our data analyses. Thank you again for all your support in helping ensure our fieldwork moves forward, and we can't wait to start sharing our results once we get things moving!

Best Regards,

Sherman