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FRENCH: I’m Kirk French. I’m an archaeologist, and I teach in the Department of Anthropology
here at Penn State.
DUFFY: My name’s Chris Duffy, and I’m a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
I’m a hydrologist, and we work on watershed modeling in different places around the country
and around the world.
FRENCH: This is a map of Palenque created by Ed Barnhart. As an undergrad, I went down
there to volunteer. While making this map over a three-year period, we kept finding
very peculiar water features, and I was very excited about it. I started trying to locate
every water feature I could, and ended up stumbling upon on top of the one out in the
Piedras Bolas, which turned out to be a water pressure system, and the earliest one known
in the New World. So what you’re seeing is about a square meter. You can see where
the red arrow is; it actually decreases in size abruptly. An easy way to think about
this is, you have a water hose, and it has pressure in it already, but you put your thumb
over it, decrease the size of the outlet, creating more pressure, and that’s really
what this is doing.
DUFFY: And it also allowed them to control the release through that outlet more easily,
so the smaller opening could be filled with chockstone or something. This conduit was
something like 60 meters long, and it started 6 meters in elevation higher than that outlet,
so the amount of pressure or head that they could recover was potentially up to around
6 meters, and so that’s the usable part of the pressure. And so, in a closed conduit,
when you turn on your tap, basically you’re using the water pressure of the tower to drive
the water pressure through the homes. Well, the Maya had the same thing, as you can see
it they did it with stone, which is sort of…fabulous.
FRENCH: People started settling around the Palenque area as early as about 100 BC. Palenque
continued until about 800 AD. It’s very small, only about 2 square kilometers, and
it’s built on very steep terrain. There’s a very small, flat area that the majority
of it’s built on, and then it’s built up into the mountains, and on an escarpment
as it drops off to the plains. Here we’re down in the plains, where today is agricultural
land used for cattle, also for growing corn. A lot of people consider it one of the most
beautiful of Maya sites. The stucco art that they have there is beyond anything else at
other sites.
DUFFY: It’s captivating. It’s an amazing place, really. And then when you get to hike
around in the jungle, which is often off-limits [howler monkeys calling], so we’re going
with the archaeologists. You can get a pass that gets you in other places even the tourists
wouldn’t get to go.
FRENCH: [sounds of thunderstorm] Palenque gets over 3300 millimeters of rainfall a year,
which is the equivalent of about 110 inches, between September and December. Now this is
just a great shot to show a side of the aqueduct that we don’t get to see very often because
we’re usually there in the dry season.
DUFFY: What’s interesting as well is that this aqueduct still functions. So one of the
things we wanted to do was to measure the actual flow rate so we’d have some idea
of how much water did the Maya have to deal with. And so we brought in an acoustic device
that measures the flow velocity.
FRENCH: So this is me in the Otolum, and I’m installing a pressure transducer, which really
measures the pressure of the water, or the depth. So I went home that night and thought
about how to take a photograph of it, and I thought I needed some glass, and so I used
a casserole dish. You put it on the water, and then everything clears up, and then you
take a photo of it. We found this water pressure system. We want to know how it was used. There
are these features in the palace that have long been suggested as toilets of some kind.
They’re all on the same drain, they are shaped like toilets in the sense that they
are the right height, fairly low, you sit on them, there’s a drain that connects all
4 of them. There’s also a sweat bath. So we would love to use some ground-penetrating
radar, which kind of X-rays underground.
DUFFY: We also want to get a deeper understanding of how people understand their water. How
do you manipulate water, and how do you engineer features that allow you to use it more efficiently,
especially when you have very long dry seasons. These Maya were wonderful engineers in that
sense.
FRENCH: I just assumed that at other universities, this kind of cross-disciplinary research happened
all the time. And it was really Chris that told me, and several other full professors
that have told me that Oh no, at other universities it’s not like that.
DUFFY: So one of the more satisfying parts to this research is a chance for a water resources
engineer to work with an archaeologist, and this is really a strength that Penn State
has. There’s no penalties for crossing borders of research. And also I think that’s where
the new science is going to be, at the fringes of multiple disciplines.