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Sunday, January 22, 2006
U. of New Hampshire's Indiana Jones
Here's a pop piece to entertain you:
It took Bill Saturno nearly a year to tell his wife and kids about his discovery of a lifetime.
That’s because the University of New Hampshire assistant professor of anthropology had nearly killed himself when he trekked into the Guatemalan jungle in March 2001 in search of artifacts rumored to have been uncovered by looters.
"I didn’t want to tell her what an idiot I had been - how I had put her and our family at risk," Saturno said with a guilty chuckle during a recent telephone interview from Santa Fe, N.M., where he is on sabbatical writing a book about the discovery of a mural that has set the Maya anthropological clock back some 500 years.
"We didn’t tell anybody until March of 2002 - that’s when the April National Geographic was released with the first article about the site," said Saturno, 36, a research associate at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, who set out with a small party funded by National Geographic on what was supposed to be an afternoon search for the as-yet undiscovered site of San Bartolo, north of Tikal (one of the great ancient Maya cities of Guatemala).
The group leaders heard rumors that looters had found stele (elaborately engraved stone slabs) and wanted to try and secure the site before it was pilfered.
Full story here.
Posted by Will at January 22, 2006 01:16 PM in Anthropology | In the News | Maya Archaeology