San Pedro Daily
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Ambergris Caye, Belize Friday August 17, 2007 Belize's only Daily- Seven Days a Week |
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Category 2 Hurricane Dean
Heading for Belize?  The first hurricane of
the season
formed today in the Atlantic Ocean. It is hurricane dean and last
reports are that the storm is packing winds of up to 100 miles an hour.
That makes it a category two hurricane and there is cause for concern
in Belize because some projections show that the storm could be headed
in our direction. So, there is cause for concern, but not alarm, not
yet. Forecaster Ann Gordon says if the storm stays on its current
track, it could be on Belize’s coast by Tuesday.
Ann Gordon, Meteorologist “Dean is moving presently on a westward track and the cone of probability or the zone where the hurricane can possibly make landfall is as far north as southern Cuba and as far south as Honduras. So Belize is within that cone of probability. So what we need to do presently is monitor the situation closely and keep the Belizean nation abreast of the situation. By Sunday, the National Met Service will probably be in the preliminary phase, that will give the nation at least 72 hours to make preparations.” Keith Swift, So your advice tonight to Belizeans is what? Ann Gordon, “You should listen to the National Met Service. We have a six hour update everyday.” Keith Swift, Should people start looking at plans for evacuation and boarding up their houses and stuff like that? Is it too early to do that? Ann Gordon, “Keith it is always good to be prepared. Like I said at this moment, based on where Hurricane Dean is, it’s too early to say definitely that it’s making a beeline for Belize. However, like I said we should always be prepared during a hurricane season.” A couple things to note are that the storm is moving at 23 miles per hour which is fast. Normally that isn’t good for a storm but the Met Department says that because conditions are favorable, it will continue to develop. It is forecasted to become a category four storm. Read More Dr. Jaime Awe, The
Spelunker
 Spelunking: it’s a funny sounding word which basically means: ‘exploring caves.’ That would make Dr. Jaime Awe a spelunker. He’s made much of his reputation in archaeology exploring caves. But he doesn’t do it just for the sake of exploration, he does it to find archaeological treasures. That’s because caves are a major part of the Mayan schema of life, death and worship. And Awe says there is a world beneath Belize. Yesterday, he took us on a virtual tour of the caves of western Belize. Dr. Jaime Awe, Director of Archaeology “In Belize we are blessed, we are fortunate. We have thousands of cave. To the ancient Mayas and to the modern Mayas, caves represent one of the most sacred landscapes. Caves represent the portals, the doorways, the entrances into the Maya underworld. The shot we are looking at gives us a sense of how the Maya divided their universe. To the Maya, just like us, the universe has three levels: you have the heavens, and the Maya heavens it has thirteen layers. The middle layer is earth and that’s where humans live, that’s where the Maya built their big temples, that’s where they have their agricultural fields. And below earth, there is the underworld and that is the domain of the some of the Gods.” And those landscapes are plentiful in Belize and the secretes they reveal are plentiful. Dr. Jaime Awe, “Some of these caves like the one that we see here are very easy to access, anybody can go into them. Some of them also are enormous, in fact in the Chiquibul at Aktun Cabal, this is called the sand chamber, it is very large. You can see some people right there, there, here, another person at the far end.” And it impressive not only in physical scale, the mysteries and archeological intrigues are also daunting. Dr. Jaime Awe, “In some caves for instance, we find paintings of different images. In this case, at a cave call Handprint Cave, we find these handprints painted against the wall and there are several caves in Belize with these kind of handprints. In other caves, or I should say in most caves, we find pottery. In other caves we find a lot of evidence that the Maya conducted human sacrifice. Here in this cave you can see several skulls of people that were sacrificed. We know that the Maya went into these caves, because in that big chamber we found, this is a piece of a pine torch. The ancient Maya went into these caves using torches, pine torches, and what we have found is that sometimes at every two hundred yards or so, we have found little bundles of pine. They were leaving fuel along the way. At Barton Creek Cave we also found that they offered humans as sacrifice. There are some skulls from people that could have been decapitated because that was one form of human sacrifice. This is a little finger bone that has been modified. You can see it is like a little eye, like a nose, and like a mouth. That’s the little bone at the end of ones finger. We have pots and inside some of the pots at Barton Creek, we have found the seeds of chili pepper and we have also found corn.” And of course, the mother of all caves for human sacrifices is Aktun Tunichil Muknal. Dr. Jaime Awe, “And then the ultimate offering, the offering of humans and we find, like I said, about fifteen skeletons in Tunichil Muknal. This one is of a male person, about thirty to forty years of age. The teeth have been modified and he was sacrificed inside the main chamber. But he is not the only individual in here. Here you can see several individuals. In fact half the people that we find sacrificed in caves are younger than fifteen, they are children. This child here is only about nine years old. This skull is of another individual, probably between sixteen and seventeen years old. And here, in these two pictures, there are infants, no more than one year old. And one of the most awesome pictures in Aktun Tunichil Muknal is the sacrifice of this young woman, about twenty years of age. She is still laid out there and you can still see her, exactly how we found her.” Awe was part of the group that was the first to see those sacrificial remains 15 years ago and he still remembers what it was like. Dr. Jaime Awe, “This is the important thing: no one, no other archaeologist, no other human has seen these things for about two thousand years. You can’t explain the adrenaline that goes through, you can’t explain how special that moment is, you just have to live it and I still remember going up to that chamber where that young woman was laid out and looking at this for the first time with my headlamp, it was like wow. It is like going back in time and you just wish that the people that you are looking at could talk to you and could tell you what went on.” And that job has now been left to this archaeologist. Read More NOTICES/LETTERS
TO THE EDITOR
Hurricane Dean
Updates- CLICK HERE
Commentary: Here we go, another hurricane! Scheduled power outage- Friday 17 August, 1:30 to 4:30 PM. Areas to be Affected: From Caribbean Depot, Bowen & Bowen water treatment plant, San Pablo Subd., DFC Subdivision and Escalante All
parents of
registered Holy Cross Anglican School
students are required to attend the parent/teacher conference on August
26 at 2 pm.
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