Francisco Estrada-Belli poses at the bottom of a Maya chultun, an underground storage chamber, at Cival. Photo courtesy of Francisco Estrada-Belli.

The Society for American Archaeology is holding its annual conference in Vancouver, Canada from March 26 through March 30 and I’m lucky to be here, along with what I overheard are 8,000 other people interested in the subject. Over the course of four days there are somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 presentations covering anything from million year-old rhino teeth from Chinese caves to how to teach soldiers in Iraq about archaeology using playing cards. This is the kind of place where I come to look for stories.

Fortunately, I have a lot of help. Aside from my colleague Christina Elson, who is also here at the conference, there are scads of archaeologists here who have received research grants from the Society’s prestigious Committee for Research and Exploration. Most are thankful for the support they’ve received and are eager to help.

Here’s how a day at a conference like this goes:

I started off the day having breakfast with Francisco Estrada-Belli, a charming and energetic fellow who has received eleven grants from the Society for his research on the Maya. He’s currently doing great work at several different Maya sites; a lot of it relates to National Geographic’s August 2007 cover story on the Maya. That breakfast made me miss grantee Jon Erlandson’s presentation on a Viking longhouse at Hrisbru, Iceland, but I caught the presentations of others working on the same project. The longhouse was a boat-shaped building apparently covered with turf. You can see still see some old turf-covered farm buildings in Iceland today.

Lunch was with five-time grantee Bill Folan, a veteran of some fifty years of archaeological research in Mexico. National Geographic funded him to work at Calakmul, a major Maya site with over 6,000 structures. He’s currently working at Oxpemul, a site relocated by another grantee, Ivan Šprajc.

After lunch I wanted to be in two places at the same time. Grantee Mike Parker Pearson was speaking about Stonehenge in one room at exactly the same time that grantee Gregory Possehl was speaking about the complexities of the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex in another. I opted to listen to Possehl, because I wanted to hear him say “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” five times fast. I think I made the right choice. There was good stuff in that session, including a presentation on Jiroft in Iran.

From there I plunged into a session organized by a new grantee, Chris Norton. The topic was early humans in East Asia and Australasia. It was great to hear about Chris’s research in person. As I was leaving the session I bumped into another grantee whose work I have been interested in for a long time. It was Paul Tacon, who was funded by National Geographic to explore the Wollemi region of the Blue mountains in Australia in search of early aboriginal rock art.

Every one of these grantees had a story to tell, in fact they all had many stories. I’ll be thinking hard about how to get their stories to you. In the meantime, I’d better prepare myself for tomorrow!

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