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"The mural is important not just for the art," says Saturno, "but for what it can tell us about a period of dramatic change leading up to the establishment of kings and dynastic rule, the building of pyramids, the differentiation of social classes and the florescence of a universal art style and hieroglyphic writing."

On this trip, the entire west wall of the mural room was excavated, as well as the site's palace structure. As they uncovered rooms buried for millennia, the students defined royal residential and administrative areas. In addition, they helped survey the surrounding forest in search of new archaeological sites.

The murals at San Bartolo tell the stories of myths in narrative form. Above, a re-creation of a section of the mural shows how the original must have appeared. More details about the excavation are available on the project's Web site at http://www.sanbartolo.org/.

"I have been given permission by the government to run the project any way I want, but the fact is I want to do it in a way that serves as a benefit not just to me and a few other archaeologists, but the local community, undergraduate students and the Guatemalan government as well," Saturno says. "Archaeology is a subfield of anthropology, and that shouldn't be forgotten. I think of myself as not just an archaeologist, but an ambassador of sorts."

Once the project was established, Saturno set out to find a way to share the experience with his anthropology students at UNH, convincing the Guatemalan government to grant special permission for undergraduates to participate.

Saturno's first archaeological experience was during college at the Grasshopper Pueblo field school in Arizona. "I wasn't the best student. And I didn't really have a sense of it at the time, but an entire generation of world-famous archaeologists had been trained there. The director took a real chance on me, and to this day I don't know why he did, but it completely changed my life. Because of that experience, I want to pass on some of what I learned to another generation of students," he says.

For Edwards, working with Saturno has solidified her desire to focus on tourism and development in anthropology. "The artifacts and the site itself are priceless, and it's so important that the people who live in the surrounding towns are not exploited. We need to teach people how to value cultures," she says.

El Mirador, a site about 60 kilometers from San Bartolo, has a tourism and development plan that Edwards hopes to study. "I can't wait to start my research. What Bill is doing in Guatemala is a great example of the right way to do things. I want to do my part to protect sites like San Bartolo."

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