Buzz at Tikal

Posted by Buzz

Once we decided to come to Guatemala for our winter getaway, I knew that one of the places I wanted to visit on our trip was Tikal. It’s a famous archaeological site for the Mayan civilization. If you know me, you also know that one doesn’t have to talk too long or hard to convince me to visit an archaeological site. Tikal is rated as one of the great archaeological sites in the world to visit. It’s a huge site with scores of monumentally large temples and buildings. A total of over 2,000 buildings, altars, and smaller installations such as storage pits have been found. 

Beyond that, I have a rather unusual connection to Tikal. Back in 1977, as a new Ph.D. student, I took a class in archaeological methods from a young professor named Dennis Puleston. He was a new world archaeologist who was working at Tikal, and after I took that course, I asked him to be on my Ph.D. oral committee because I really liked him. In the spring of 1978 he invited me to work on a project with his research by photographing the wear patterns on stone tools from Tikal using a scanning electron microscope. However, in the summer of 1978, while he was vacationing with his family, he was killed when he was struck by lightning while standing on the top of Chichen Itza, a large Mayan temple in Mexico. (See this link for a bio: http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/puleston_dennis.html)

So, as it happened, when I met my guide, Antonio, at Tikal, I asked him how long he had been at Tikal. He told me he grew up at Tikal and that his father had helped with the excavations that the University of Pennsylvania was doing back in the late 60’s and early 70’s. He told me that, as a kid, he played around Tikal all the time while his dad helped on the excavation. On a whim, I asked him if he happened to know Denny Puleston. “Oh yes,” he replied. “I remember him very well. He was one of the rising stars among the archaeologists working at Tikal.”  I smiled and said to Antonio, “I had Denny Puleston as a professor at the University of Minnesota.” He smiled, shook my hand, and we hit it off from that point.

Coming Soon: Part II (In the jungle at Tikal)