Assistant Professor of Anthropology Keith Prufer has to carefully schedule his spring workload so he can get to Belize and complete preparations for his excavations in Uxbenká, the remains of a small city in one of the most rural areas in the country. UNM graduate and undergraduate students and students from four other participating universities will join him at the end of spring semester.
Prufer says Uxbenká was part of the Mayan civilization and held 10,000 to 12,000 people in a small but flourishing city until the tenth century; when the Mayans suddenly left, and didn’t return in significant numbers for more than 500 years. He wants to know why. So he and his students go to Belize every summer as they search for answers
Today only a few hundred people live in a small Mopan Maya village near the ruins. They are all farmers he says and there are no jobs or employment opportunities. There is no electricity. Prufer will oversee excavation at the ruin and at a small nearby religious shrine. They want to know why the Mayans felt they needed to move out of the area. “It was possibly some kind of internal political failure that caused people to just want to pack up and walk away, “he says. “It’s a very lush area, so even if there was a significant drop in rainfall, people would have been able to survive, but they just chose to move on.”
UNM, the University of Oregon, Florida Southern University, the University of California-Davis and the University of Southern California are all working together on a grant from the National Science Foundation to explore the site and write about their findings. In addition the Alphawood Foundation in Chicago has given UNM $54,000 to support the investigation into the excavation of the site at Uxbenká and a foundational cave-shrine complex located on a high cliff overlooking the ancient city.
Prufer, who has been excavating at the site since 2004, says it will be a busy summer for his students. Three undergraduate students are working on honors theses, and three doctoral students will be researching specific problems. There will also be students from the other participating universities on the site. He expects the first papers about the research at the excavation to begin appearing in professional journals near the end of the year.