ON CAMPUS
Research Anthropology student studies Stairway to Heaven and earns Phi Beta Kappa Research Award.
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Millsaps Magazine | Summer 2011 Millsaps Magazine | Summer 2011 11
Photo © Kendall Messick
van Parker, a 2011 graduate, received the Phi Beta Kappa Award for Excellence in Honors Research. He focused his honors research on a small Mayan hilltop archaeological site in the Yucatán peninsula. The site, Stairway to Heaven, is comprised of several elite residences along with other dwellings that would have housed people who prepared food, made lithics, and built the dwellings on the hill. The goal of his project was basically to determine how quickly the inhabitants of the hilltop “When we reached abandoned their homes and to explore what may the floor surface of have led them to abandon the site. each building, we “From 2008 to 2010, we have been excavatfound that the Maya ing several of the structures on the hilltop,” he who lived there had said. “When we reached the floor surface of each building, we found that the Maya who lived there left many of their had left many of their belongings. For example, belongings...” when we excavated one of the elite residences, we found a large number of smashed pots on the floor. These were formerly whole vessels that the Maya had left when they abandoned the hilltop. Now, the interesting thing about this is that Evan Parker records data from the dig in the Yucatán Peninsula. most people don’t just leave all of their belongings when they move somewhere. You typically move things at a slow and steady pace. This is called a gradual abandonment. However, these Maya left all of their stuff, meaning that they didn’t take the time or didn’t want to take the time to move their things to a new location. This means didn’t return in this case, and we believe that this was most likely that the site was rapidly abandoned; however, we determined that tied to political processes in the region during this period of time.” Parker worked on his research with Dr. George Bey III, professor they rapidly abandoned the site but planned to return to it.” A combination of drought and political turmoil in the region of sociology and anthropology at Millsaps and one of the directors may have led to this case of rapid abandonment with a planned of the Bolonchen Regional Archaeological Project. Parker presented return, he said. “These Maya didn’t have a source of running water his research at the 2011 meeting of the Society for American Arand couldn’t access the water table, so they had to store rainwater chaeology in Sacramento, Calif. He was the only undergraduate prein cisterns. The moment their cisterns ran dry in a drought, they senter in his particular research symposium. He will attend Tulane University in the fall to earn a doctorate in would have to leave the hill. In the past, they most likely would have returned as soon as rain refilled their cisterns. However, they anthropology, specifically Maya archaeology.