KU News Release

Surviving Guatemala not a game for KU Fulbright scholar studying ancient Maya

Jessica Craig

LAWRENCE — What do KU alum Danni Boatwright, winner on TV’s “Survivor,” and University of Kansas Fulbright scholar Jessica Craig have in common? Short answer: experience with bugs, spiders and heat in Guatemalan jungles.

While “Survivor” was being filmed in Guatemala, Craig, KU doctoral student in archaeology, was dealing with tropical temperatures and tarantulas in the Maya pyramids at the ancient city of San Bartolo in northeastern Guatemala. She worked on a research team that has uncovered the earliest known Maya mural, dating to 100 B.C.

The January issues of Science and National Geographic magazines reported the Maya mural research led by William Saturno, an archaeologist with the University of New Hampshire and the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. National Geographic online features a photo of Craig working at San Bartolo at www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0601/feature5/gallery1.html. More about San Bartolo is available online at www.sanbartolo.org/.

San Bartolo even attracted “Survivor” producers for a visit a few months before they began filming for the Guatemala series last year. “They brought us chocolate and cold drinks, so the show’s OK in my book,” Craig said.

In January, Craig returned to campus to complete a doctorate after a year of fieldwork in Guatemala supported by a Fulbright grant. The young archaeologist has spent part of the past four years working with Saturno in Guatemala. In December 2004, she received her master’s in anthropology from KU. Craig’s master’s and doctoral research focuses on reconstruction of ancient Maya ritual behavior.

Like the “Survivor” players, Craig adapted to tropical heat, bugs and spiders — including tarantulas — and falling rocks at the excavation sites. “Spiders, particularly tarantulas,” she said, “tend to mind their own business.” Eventually, she learned to let tarantulas run across her palm and to wear a hardhat rather than trying to dodge falling stones.

Unlike those featured on the TV show, for Craig the payoff was not $1 million but finding thousands of pottery sherds, the bones of an individual buried beneath the floor of what had been the home of a high-ranking Maya — as part of their ritual to honor the dead — and uncovering a big stone monument that was the focal point for an ancient shrine. She regards a trowel as a musical instrument. “You get to where you hear distinctive sounds,” when using a trowel. “You know when it hits stone or bone or pottery.”

All artifacts and bones remain in Guatemala. Part of Craig’s work was to photograph, sketch, identify and record the location of each find. Craig carried an atlas of bones notebook from her KU graduate osteology course with her at the excavation sites. David Frayer, KU professor of anthropology, taught the course and required students to draw their own atlas of bones — a teaching technique that Craig says trains an the eye to commit details to memory and guides her in recognizing bones buried for centuries under acidic soils.

When Hurricane Stan slammed into the Yucatan Peninsula last fall, the San Bartolo site did not suffer much damage compared to the devastation from heavy rains in the southern highland areas. An entire village was literally buried by mudslides, killing about 400 people. Craig and her husband, Adam Stokes, who worked as a musician in Guatemala last year, were among the volunteers who helped survivors move thigh-deep mud out of homes into streets. “We formed assembly lines and used garden hoes to move the mud,” she said.

Craig said serendipity led her to San Bartolo. Her KU graduate adviser, John Hoopes, professor of anthropology, had taught Saturno as an undergraduate when Hoopes was on the faculty at the University of New York-Binghamton. Craig earned a bachelor’s in anthropology at Binghamton in 1998. When Saturno issued a call for graduate students in 2001 to help with the San Bartolo project, Hoopes encouraged Craig to apply.

Craig plans to complete her doctorate in 2008. She is the daughter of Margaret and Lee DeCoster of Phelps, N.Y., and is a graduate of Newark High School in New York.

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