Excitement mounted among the four anthropology students as their plane touched down in Mérida, near the northern tip of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. After multiple flights, their destination lay another two hours south in Oxcutzcab, a small agricultural town popular with visitors to the ancient Maya ruins that are scattered across hundreds of kilometers in the Puuc region.

Diana Chavez, a junior, and three fellow CSUDH students would spend four weeks working alongside local excavators to shed greater light on the history of the Yucatec Maya. Their focus? The history of these ancient settlements in an area of the country without access to any natural water supplies—except whatever rainfall the inhabitants could gather and store during the six-month wet season.

Chavez grew up watching Indiana Jones swashbuckle his way across the remains of multiple civilizations, which taught her that archaeology is a valuable pursuit—minus the bullwhip and exploitation. “I’m interested in a more ethical approach,” she says, “that balances museum curatorship with the need for repatriation of artifacts to the cultures that produced them.” She credits two other influences for her interest in archaeology: her father and his love of history; and Ken Seligson, an archaeological anthropologist and associate professor at CSUDH, whose passion for Mesoamerican history helped convince her to transfer from Long Beach City College.

Seligson began the field work program in 2019, so that CSUDH students could participate in valuable field experience and help direct their professional interests. The goal for this trip was to conduct a series of test excavations in the Kaxil Kiuic Biocultural Reserve; specifically, an ancient platform and ball court dating to somewhere between 900 BC and 300 BC.

The students and professor set out to focus their research on the timeline of the settlement at two sites: Cerro Hul and Xanub Chak. But that took a back seat after Seligson’s students, working alongside Yucatec Maya excavators, made an extraordinary discovery that could fundamentally alter the chronology of how and when Maya civilization took root in the Puuc region.

A Groundbreaking Find

Mexican law requires local workers be hired for excavation at archaeological sites. The policy aligns with Chavez’s thoughts about the questionable ethics of Hollywood explorers: that the people whose history is being studied should be the ones directly in contact with their land. After the indigenous excavators remove dirt and debris from the dig site, they hand off what has been uncovered to archaeologists like Seligson and his students, who can then clean up and study what they found. So it was José Chi Xool, one of the Yucatec Maya working with the student team, who first uncovered the surprising artifact, buried beneath centuries of dirt.

Alyssa Guerrero, a senior, says the day of the discovery started like any other. The team was less than a week into their field work, hiking two sweaty kilometers each day through newly cleared jungle track to get to the site. They gathered near the platform dig site at Xanub Chak, as José Chi Xool uncovered pieces of a centuries-old plate—already a valuable find. “And then we heard him say, in Spanish, ‘That looks like a doll.’ ”

Doll or figurine, nothing like it had ever been unearthed this far north. Seligson says similar artifacts were being made in northern Guatemala and western Belize, but archaeologists haven’t discovered any in this region of Mexico. He and the students knew immediately that they had stumbled on an artifact of particular importance. “It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever found in my 14 years of working here, and the students managed to find it on their fourth day of excavation,” Seligson says. “We don’t know for sure yet what to make of it.”

For Guerrero, the moment recalled what CSUDH Professor Jerry Moore said in his ancient civilizations course. Specifically, that the practice of archaeology often amounted to long periods of boredom punctuated by brief moments of excitement. “Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait that long for the exciting stuff,” Guerrero says.

Uncovering the Maya World

Seligson says the discovery of the figurine was a delightful surprise. “We weren’t there to find artifacts like that. We were there to look at a specific iteration of sociopolitical evolution in the region.”

Since 2010, Seligson has spent four weeks each summer in the Puuc region to examine the chronology of permanent settlement and how the communities that lived there related to larger and better-known Maya centers further south. The 4,500-acre Kaxil Kiuic Reserve, where this dig site is located, is owned by a nonprofit formed at Millsaps College in Mississippi. Millsaps also operates a research lab and guest houses 30 minutes away, where Seligson and his students gained temporary respite from the sweltering summer heat.

Since its establishment, the Kaxil Kiuic Reserve has provided archaeologists with intriguing new details about the ancient Maya communities that once lived in the Puuc region, despite its challenging geology and geography. “There is no surface water at all,” Seligson says. “No streams, no lakes, no rivers, nothing—and it only rains for six months out of the year.”

Permanent settlement required careful resource management systems. To survive, people living there had to develop intricate environmental mechanisms, Seligson says—for example, capturing and storing enough water to last through the long dry season.

Archaeologists have long thought that settlers in the Puuc region arrived in the late Preclassic period from about 300 BC onward. Tomás Gallareta Negrón, a senior archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropology and History, says that recent archaeological evidence suggests a much earlier date.

“We know from the arrangement and type of buildings that we’re finding that these communities were much larger and more sophisticated than we once thought,” says Negrón, who has worked at such important Maya sites as Cobá, Uxmal, Chichen Itzá, and Isla Cerritos. “We also know that they arrived much earlier than previously thought, probably around 900-1000 BCE.”

The discovery of the figurine suggests that Puuc Maya communities had ties with larger cultural centers to the south. “The discovery of the figurine pushes back on the idea that the region was a cultural backwater until the South started to collapse and people moved North,” Seligson says. “It tells us that there was a parallel cultural trajectory in the North.”

Tools of the Trade

Jose Quintero, a senior anthropology major with a concentration in archaeology, says getting such valuable field work experience brought the Puuc Maya community to life. “Classroom archaeology is one thing, but I’m learning that archaeologists want to be out in the world and doing archaeology,” he says.

Quintero worked with Seligson to create LiDAR mapping of the areas the team wanted to explore during this field work season. He also used GPS readings to measure and orient the outlines of structures revealed by LiDAR. “You really get the sense that you’re sort of seeing what the people who lived here thousands of years ago saw,” he says.

Reese Santonil came to archaeology by way of computer science. The senior anthropology major spent part of the field work season creating 3D renderings of artifacts excavated and catalogued in the Kaxil Kiuic Reserve, including some of the new ceramic fragments the CSUDH team uncovered.

The process involves setting the artifact on a white backdrop and photographing it from all different angles. “To get the finished rendering, I use software that stitches the images together to create a 3D model,” Santonil says. The images can be used to create a virtual catalogue that students and other researchers around the world can access when they can’t visit Kaxil Kiuic in person.

Chavez is pursuing an individual research project, called Star Sanctuaries and Platforms, which looks at the spatial orientation of Ma-ya structures and whether that might correlate to religious or ritual use. The project combines archaeology, culture, and religion, and Chavez drew inspiration from her Honduran grandmother—a curandero, or traditional healer. “She was very syncretic about religion, combining traditional Catholic elements with older folk traditions. That really prompted my interest in cultural anthropology.”

Past and Present

Seligson hopes the field work experience gives his students a broader perspective on the people that lived in the Puuc region thousands of years ago, and the ones that still do. “One of the things driving my own research is the need to help people understand that the Maya culture overall is not a culture of the past,” he says. “There are still seven million Maya people alive and well today.”

There’s still a lot about the Puuc Maya that remains unknown, says Seligson. “It’s like working on a jigsaw puzzle without having the cover of the box to know if you’ve got it right.” He says the 2024 field work season will focus on broader excavations at the Xanub Chak site where the figurine was discovered, and supported by a new three-year grant from the National Science Foundation.

“We’ve clearly confirmed that the site is Middle Preclassic, dating from between 900 BCE and 350 BCE,” says Seligson. “Now, we want to learn more about the construction history of some of the buildings. Why did the people in this community not build on top of the platform and ball courts when they did so at other sites from the same period?”

A lot more work remains to be done, says Seligson, who plans to publish a paper this year with his students on the discovery of the figurine. “We have a lot of broader questions we want answers to, and that will require a lot more excavation. We’re really just at the start of it.”

Enlightening LiDAR

Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, is a remote sensing method that uses a pulsed laser to map the contours of the Earth’s surface. Data is gathered by an instrument attached to a low-flying aircraft that emits 150,000 laser pulses every second.

LiDAR helps researchers see beneath the thick canopy. Just like sunlight through leaves, a few laser pulses reach the ground every square foot. Maps can then be generated by digitally removing the forest canopy to reveal the contours of physical structures on the ground beneath.

This technology saves time and is much less invasive than older practices says Seligson. “For an area the size of two kilometers, it could take as many as five or 10 years of walking back and forth on the forest floor to gather enough data for a map. It would also require cutting back a lot of the forest.”

---

Darkness falls over the looming peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains, and a group of CSUDH students huddle around a roaring campfire. It’s the middle of October, and the temperature in the Owens Valley dips sharply when the sun goes down.

George Wing smiles as the students’ laughter echoes across the campground. He’s been bringing students to Bishop, Calif., for nearly a decade, to participate in an intramural class unlike any other at the university: fly fishing.

Most of the students who sign up have no prior experience fishing or camping, and learning the skills to enjoy the outdoors is as much a focus of the class as catching fish. “It’s been life-changing for a lot of them,” says Wing, turning toward the ring of students around the campfire. “I get texts and photos from former students all the time. Now they’re going camping and fishing with their own children.”

Fishing in Urban Los Angeles

Wing arrived at CSUDH in 1988 as head coach of the baseball team, later joining the faculty of the Kinesiology Department as a lecturer in 2006, and director of Intramural Sports in 2011. Three years later, Wing and department chair Michael Ernst came up with the idea for the fly-fishing class.

The curriculum is informal but rigorous. Students learn their way around a fly rod and the necessary accessories—fly lines, leaders, tippets. They discover the subtle art of tying flies and securing them to their lines. Finally, they practice the gentle, whip-like cast that, if done correctly, drops the fly lightly on the surface of the water.

A portion of each class is set aside for students to practice their casting at the university swimming pool. “Casting is one of the hardest things for me to learn,” says Savannah Foster, a junior design major at CSUDH who is taking the class for a second time. “When you’re near a river, there are trees that can snag your line. It won’t be completely flat like the pool.”

Learning the proper uses of a back cast or a roll cast is only part of the difficulty, Foster adds. “I can never remember how to tie the various knots. I always need help. I learn the knots, and then I forget them. I’m hoping the lessons will eventually stick.”

Each semester, the class packs up their camping equipment (funded by the Associated Students, Inc. through the Instructionally Related Activities fee) and piles into a van headed north. Soon, they’ll find out if their casting technique and hand-tied flies are good enough to fool the rainbow trout populating the region’s rivers and streams, and if nights under the starry skies are everything Wing promised they’d be.

Fellowship of the Fly

It’s rarely just Wing alone with his class on these trips. Daniel Garcia completed a post-baccalaureate certification in the Clinical Lab Science program at CSUDH in 2019. He took Wing’s class twice as a student and has continued to join field trips as a mentor to new students ever since. “I picked up fly fishing pretty quickly, and maybe Coach Wing recognized my passion for it,” he said.

Then there’s Thom Glonchak, a retired firefighter who met Wing when their sons played on the same youth baseball team. They have coached together, and now they share a passion for fly fishing, which Glonchak brings to the field trips as well. “I like to figure out where the fish are hiding or holding in the stream or river,” he says. “Then you have to figure out which fly to use and what will entice them to bite.”

It was on the lower Owens River a year ago that Glonchak met Mark Williams, a transportation and logistics professional who lives in Bishop and devotes any spare time he has to fly fishing. Williams later met Wing, and since then has fished alongside students each semester when they come to Bishop.

“George and these kids really inspired me to give back what was given to me,” says Williams, who took a previous class to see ancient petroglyphs in Chidago Canyon just north of Bishop. These rock art sites were created thousands of years ago by ancestors of the Paiute-Shoshone peoples.

“There’s so much to learn out here,” says Williams. “There were people here long before me, and there’ll be people here long after I’m gone. The lessons that these opportunities give are priceless.”

It’s not just petroglyphs and campsites on these trips. Located 45 minutes south on Highway 395, the Manzanar National Historic Site is a potent reminder not only of the forcible relocation of Japanese Americans during World War II but of a longer tradition of displacement that saw the removal of Owens Valley Paiute settlements by ranchers in the late 19th century. It’s also a fixture on every student trip to Bishop.

Joshua Barragan, a senior environmental studies major, says Manzanar provides an important opportunity to learn the history and culture of the areas where they fish. “There’s so many stories that are told at Manzanar, and so many records of peoples’ lives,” he says. “The last time we came, we actually met a former internee during our tour who shared some of his personal memories of life at the camp.”

Connecting People, Places, and Things

Wing turned 70 this year and says he’s beginning to think about retirement. For now, he plans to continue the class that has meant so much to so many students. “Coach Wing’s approach to teaching is really gentle,” says Foster, who took the course the first time to ease back into her studies after taking a break. “It’s the opposite of an academic course. He’s just like, ‘This is what I do, this is why I love it, and I want to share it with you.’ It was just such a welcoming experience coming back from a year off.”

As the fire begins to sputter at the Bishop campground, students start preparing for bed. Morning comes early, and they have a full itinerary. A few of them celebrated their first catch earlier in the day and are excited for more. Others haven’t been as fortunate. In the end, the results don’t always seem as important than the process. “Fly fishing connects you to the natural world, and it creates bonds between people,” says Wing. “In Owens Valley, it also connects you to those who have fished these waters for thousands of years. Now we’ve all become part of the long history of this place.”

---

A lot of what makes higher education at CSUDH special happens outside the traditional four walls of the classroom. Experiential and co-curricular learning are part of the strategic mission of the university—embedded deeply in the values we promote as an institution and that we seek to instill in our students.

Just in the last several months, our Toros have evaluated child development strategies in southern Italy, supported occupational therapy services in an area of central Bulgaria with few institutional resources, visited the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and uncovered new artifacts of global significance in the jungles of eastern Mexico that fill critical gaps in our understanding of Mayan culture.

Closer to home, CSUDH students have explored the stunning natural beauty of the Sierra Nevadas in Bishop, Calif. during an annual flyfishing trip. Along the way, they’ve learned about land and water conservation, explored the history of the indigenous population of the Owens Valley region, and visited the Manzanar National Historic Site, where thousands of Japanese Americans were interned during World War II.  

“The idea behind transformation education is that your student experience changes you,” says Rob Goodwin, founder of the travel company Stone & Compass. A graduate of CSUDH, Goodwin founded the company in 2011 as a full-service travel agency but also as a mechanism to give students from across the country a chance to expand their educational horizons.

He estimates that about 1,000 CSUDH students have participated in his study abroad programs in the last 13 years. “We run these programs for CSUDH at a deep discount by raising funds in other areas to offset the costs,” says Goodwin. “My professors at CSUDH believed in my potential, even though I had a pretty indifferent educational background. They helped me believe in myself, so it’s my way of giving back.”  

The company operates as a fully vested nonprofit organization that also raises funding for projects that support communities in need throughout the world. “Our mission is pretty simple—take a trip and change a life.”

Goodwin says his study abroad programs have made a real impact in the lives of many students. “We gauge this by what students do when they get back home,” he says. “I’ve seen some kids change their whole career path. The programs we offer help students gain a deep awareness about the world and a stronger connection to it.”

---