Parched and hungry after being lost in the Guatemalan jungle for eight hours, Bill Saturno stumbled into a cave to escape the beating sun. Inside, he found much more than shade.
Saturno, a Boston University assistant archaeology professor, found a mural depicting parts of the Mayan creation story in the cave. His accidental discovery of the mural in 2001 has been called one of the most important discoveries in Mayan archaeology in recent decades.
“We were misguided, and I happened into this looters’ excavation just to get out of the sun, and there it was,” he said.
Saturno said that trip originally sought to verify the existence of Mayan stelae – carved rock monuments – but because of a lack of time, the tour company suggested an alternate site near San Bartolo, where he found the murals.
“This is something that transforms cultural identity and becomes a symbol of the past in Guatemala,” he said.
A leader of the new Guatemala study-abroad program in the spring, Saturno will return to the mural site with students. He will take his wife and three young sons with him as well – they tend to travel together on his excursions.
“Here at BU, there’s been a long history of archaeological study abroad in the Mayan area,” he said. “This is sort of a new opportunity for the study-abroad folks, and it’s certainly a great opportunity for me to incorporate BU students into the work.”
Saturno originally developed the San Bartolo program in 2003 at the University of New Hampshire. Since then, he has excavated sites with students as part of Proyecto San Bartolo in northern Guatemala.
“In any field, once you move beyond the textbook and into practicing what a discipline is about, you see your future,” he said. “You know whether this is something you can do from a day-to-day basis.”
Saturno said his original life plan was to become a physicist like his father. His dream job of archaeology emerged later. During his sophomore year at Binghamton University, he decided to switch to archaeology and transferred to the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Grasshopper.
While some people may think of archaeology in terms of shovels, pails and digging for ceramic shards, Saturno said there is much more to the field.
“It’s all about understanding human beings,” he said. “It’s about understanding what we did in the past and how that might be relevant to what we do today. It’s more than just history.”
Saturno said his discovery has given him an optimism that much more is still to be found.
“If you could find this sort of discipline-changing thing at an average site that you didn’t even know about in 2000, how many more discipline-changing finds are there?” he said.
For aspiring archaeologists, Saturno said the “real test” is how much students love their work.
“The person that loves archaeology doesn’t need to find a lost city, doesn’t need to find murals,” he said. “Get the chance, dig early and dig often.”
