The average archaeologists down there are fantastic and care about the history of PR. The ‘politician’ archaeologists that make all the calls are pissy, territorial, self-absorbed, maniacal, 14 year old boys in their behavior. The head arch. for one of the PR governmental agencies was picking up pottery and sticking it in his pocket, standing right next to the PR governor while several news crews were interviewing them about the site. This happened right before I got there, but it was quite the buzz when I arrived. Evidently, the only ones that noticed and then mentioned that he couldn't do that was the people that I worked with. That's not just a small mistake. That kind of blatant action comes from years, if not decades, of doing that. What bumfuzzled me most was the press, though. The PR governmental entities (which there were around three that had to sign off on any kind of plan before we were allowed to do anything) told our company that we had a select time to finish the project, so dig with whatever, as fast as we could, including using heavy equipment, to determine if there was anything there. So, we did as we were told, but troweled and brushed any areas with extreme care that were cultural. The press blew the whole thing way out of proportion for their own agenda, and ran with the opportunity to turn the public against Americans. Anyone with true experience with a bobcat or backhoe knows the different densities of earth that you run across, and so you know when not to cut into a cultural layer. You can FEEL the difference, trust me. This site was full of concrete slabs from houses, cars and trucks shoved off into the woods over the last 100 years, jungle that you couldn't crawl through, giant trees, random large metal objects that 4 grown men couldn't lift, 1000’s of bottles and cans, refrigerators, washers and dryers, and boulders deposited from large landslides or floods, and various other unnamed modern trash. There was no way to look for anything at all without using some form of heavy equipment. We left it looking like a golf course. We put huge piles of sandy soil on top of the most important areas, such as the one in the photo above, in order to protect those areas from future looting by making it incredibly dangerous for someone to just dig a little hole to steal something. We even spent a week reseeding the entire site with native grasses of that elevation to both fight erosion, and blend the site properly into its surroundings. What we did to cover it was so thought out, that we actually were able to coin the process a phase IV, which is the first one in archaeological history. We even wrapped the entire site (excavations, back dirt piles, and anything else across that 9 acres) with a material called geotex to ensure that the strata would never move, and to mark the exact location of the ground level where we stopped. The excavations have several layers of it in order to keep the ground from shifting. Geotex allows water to pass through it, but stabilizes it from sinking or eroding. The site is wrapped like a Christmas present now, and in effect, it is that. There's so much dirt on top of it now, it'll take heavy equipment just to remove it all, if in fact it is EVER dug back up. Personally, I doubt it'll ever see the light of day again, and this may well be the last time you ever hear about it.
Glad to see that you're back...I understand now why you couldn't talk while you were there.