Howler Monkeys, Scorpions and Tarantulas, Oh My!

The pristine rainforest of Belize became the classroom for nine students in a geo-archaeology field course taught by geographer Nick Dunning.

Traveling during the dry season of April and May, the class camped at the Programme for Belize, a preserve about a 25-minute drive from the nearest community. They reached their headquarters for the trip after landing at the Belize City airport, driving 45 minutes on paved highway and then driving another 90 minutes on a series of dusty, crushed-limestone roads.

“I would encourage my colleagues at UC in any department to teach similar field courses,” says Dunning, a professor of geography in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences and director of UC’s Latin American Studies Program. “It’s a heck of classroom out there.”

Students worked with Dunning April 28-May 10 to study geoarchaeological trenches and gather soil samples at Maya archaeological sites. Ultimately, their work is trying to understand how the Mayas adapted to dramatic environmental changes occurring about 1,900 years ago. More immediately, the students are attempting to find out what happened to bajos during the time that the Mayas flourished and collapsed. Bajos are depressions in the limestone bedrock that were once perennial wetlands – at least that’s what Dunning and his UC colleague Vernon Scarborough surmise.

On the way to camp their first day, the UC crew saw smoke from slash-and-burn farmers. The environmental past of the Mayas could hold lessons for the ecological problems presented by today’s agricultural deforestation.

To understand more about the Mayas and their past settlements, students visited sites at La Milpa, Dos Hombres  and Lamanai.

At Dos Hombres, students learned how their guide, Oscar Garcia, contracted the respiratory illness, histoplasmosis, after he was lowered into a pit for exploratory purposes. Bats in the pit filled it with a smoky dust that turned out to be bat droppings. When a colleague didn’t believe Garcia’s description, he, too, was lowered down by the heels to see. Both he and Oscar became gravely ill. Since then, the pit, or chultun, has been named Oscar’s Chultun, in honor of the guide.

While none of the UC students was lowered head first into a chultun, they did experience some adventures of their own.

Jessica Cortes, an international affairs undergraduate from Wellington, Ohio, found a millipede on her toothbrush one morning. That same night as the 20-year-old got ready for bed and hung up some laundry, she looked down to find a scorpion crawling over her foot. “I screamed bloody murder and jumped up in the three-foot space between the ceiling and the bunk, until Ben Jones came to rescue me and retrieve the scorpion,” she says. Later Ben had his own brush with wildlife when a tarantula climbed up his leg on a dock at a swimming hole.  It fell into the water without doing any harm.

With the sounds of howler monkeys waking them every morning, the travelers got to see these noisy jungle inhabitants up close. According to PhD student Chazz Buttlon, the field researchers also got an unexpected shower from the monkeys, who let loose their urine as the team walked underneath them in the trees. Button also earned distinction by getting one of the worst rashes of all his cohorts – a poison ivy-like condition with lesions brought on by contact with the chi-chem tree, also known as the white poison wood tree.

On the plus side, the UC travelers didn’t have to endure any rainy weather during the whole trip. On the other hand, Professor Dunning points out, temperatures reached over 100 degrees some days and well into the 90s all the other days. “It was a tad warm and humid,” he says.

To cool off, the group went swimming as often as they could in the clear waters of a beautiful blue-green cenote, or water-filled limestone sinkhole, nearby.

Despite the unfamiliar surroundings and insect life, Cortes found the trip, which received some financial support from UC's Institute for Global Studies and Affairs, more than worthwhile.  “It was awesome! We learned about soils, how to profile them, how to take sediment cores, mapping, using a global positioning system, and how to use a Muncell book (a soil guide). We also had the opportunity to do some tourist type things.  It truly was an experience. I learned valuable lessons about wilderness – much more than I ever expected,” says Cortes.

Ben Jones echoes her enthusiasm. “On a scale of one to 10, I would rate the trip a 10.  I learned a great deal while being able to work outdoors with a fun group of people.  I learned a lot about Maya settlement patterns and the demise of their great civilization.” Adds Jones: “The geography department is the best kept secret on campus.”