Edwin Román-Ramírez – Stories from Guatemala

A PhD with Dyslexia

In the second and final part of his testimony, 40-year old Edwin Román-Ramírez talks about his dyslexia and the problems it posed for him, and his personal journey toward becoming an archeologist.

In his narrative, he refers to Antigua, one of Spain’s early colonial settlements in the New world, known today for its remaining colonial structures, as well as to Iximché, the capital of the Kaqchikel Maya kingdom from 1470 to 1524 and later a Spanish colonial capital. He also talks of Tikal, a Mayan archeological site which lies in the Petén region of northern Guatemala, one of the largest and most well known.

How did I become an archeologist? First, I had very supportive parents and they were able to see the things I was good at and that I was interested in, and they always encouraged me to pursue those interests. Growing up in Chimaltenango, we went very often to Iximché. We also came to Antigua almost every Sunday and we always went to mass there. These places represent so much. For instance, for the indigenous people, Iximché represents a place of resistance. For the state, it represents the first capital. Memories are in conflict and you have a different view of what happened based on who you are. But getting exposed to these places early in life really ignited my desire to know more. Many archeologists say, “well as a kid I saw “Indiana Jones” (the movie) and that’s why I started thinking about archeology.” For me, I grew up in all this history.

My mom had a picture that she showed me of her at Tikal in the 1970s and that fascinated me. I was a really bad kid for traveling, but my dad brought my oldest brother to Tikal, and they came back with all their stories of the experience, and I became very interested in what they were saying. It was a process but it started to grow on me, this interest in the past, and my parents started to recognize my fascination with it and supported me. I always wanted to know why we were doing something. I always wanted to know, “why do we eat this food, why do we use the words we do?”

I think my parents were really smart to encourage me, but it wasn’t easy for me because at that time I had dyslexia and did not know it. I was terrible in school, like really bad, and I really hated it. I was a terrible student.

I did not believe I was good enough in anything I did. Books were hard to read, my spelling was atrocious, and everybody was making fun of me. I couldn’t write, either. I always had to have someone check on my writing, so my mom and dad would often read the stuff I wrote and monitor it. They were middle school teachers.

I did not know that I had this condition, and my parents did not even know what dyslexia was. In Guatemala in the 1980s, in my hometown, nobody talked about dyslexia. So everything I did was not good enough. I always felt like, “oh man, I spent the entire year trying hard, and it didn’t work out.” And here, at that time, the schools were very militaristic. It was a time of war in the 1980s and ’90s, and the authorities were strict and would place a great deal of emphasis on memorization, and that didn’t work for me.

But I always liked adventure, and something I also had was that I actually get crazy when I don’t know something, because if I don’t know something I’m going to go and research it and figure it out. And I think now, I was able to pursue archeology because people along the way discovered that about me. Professors would say, “we don’t know this or that,” and I would go nuts and put together a lot of data about whatever it was. But expressing my findings was hard.

Here in Guatemala, before you finish high school, you have to go and work for a company for a month, to give you some experience. My field in this regard was in hotels and tourism, and most of my teachers thought I would go to Antigua, which was close by, but I said no, I wanted to go far away. My parents made an effort to send me to Panajachel (a town on the edge of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala), and for us it was really far in 1995, and we were at the end of the war.

Over there I loved it. I spent two months there working in a hotel, and when I came back I told my mom and dad that I was going to travel around the world because I met all of these foreign people who were traveling. My plan was to go by bus to Argentina, that was my dream. But my parents said, “come on, try one year of archeology, and you will be fine.” And I told them I would try.

Román-Ramírez attended the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City, the largest and oldest university in Guatemala.

I went for a year, and I did really bad at the university The second year went really really bad (laughs). Finally, my parents asked me what I was going to do and I told them that maybe I needed some responsibilities outside of studying and my mom and dad agreed. My parents said, “Maybe you need a structure and that will help you at the university.”

My mom found out that they had created a TV news show in town and suggested I go there to see if there was something I could do. I said “sure” and I got an interview with this guy, and he was wearing all these gold rings; he was really exotic. I said that I was interested in being a camera man because there was an opening for it, and after the interview, he said, “you’ve got the job.” He told me to come the next day wearing a formal, long sleeve shirt. “But you are not a camerman,” he said. “You are going to interview guests.” I told him I could not do it because I was too shy. I was a really shy kid. But he said, “I’m your boss,” so I agreed to do it.

My dad gave me a formal shirt and when I got to work I realized that I was going to interview the president of Guatemala, Álvaro Arzú! This was in 1998, two days after Girardi had been shot. (Roman Catholic Archbishop and human rights advocate Juan José Gerardi was murdered in his home following an effort to expose those responsible for atrocities committed during Guatemala’s 36-year old civil conflict. The murder caused public outrage.)

I was 18 years old, imagine that. I had no training and there I was with my long hair, I was so intimidated. I knew the president was really hard on journalists, and I never sweated more in my life, but I interviewed Arzú for 10 minutes.

Since then, I started not to have any fear of talking to people. I went back to the university and my grades got better, and then I met José Paredes, the director of the Proyecto Arqueologico del Motagua Medio and a ceramics professor. He told me to apply to work with a group of archeologists, which would be my first field experience. They just accept the best students into this program, but my grades, they sucked (laughs), you know. I had terrible grades. I told him about that but he said, “I know that, but I see something in you that I don’t see in the rest. Please apply.” Again, he saw that I had this thirst for knowledge. A passion for it. I was accepted.

When I am curious about something or I start to think about ancient times, everything around me disappears, I have nothing to do with the present-day material world. I don’t know how to describe it. The tomb of a king, a murial, but sometimes the tiny things are even more important. There is nothing like discovery and having an idea about it.

We went to a site in Zacapa called La Vega del Cobán with a small team of archeologists from my university on a small project. After I went there, I started to do better at the university. I still had problems with exams, writing and all of that, but I think I started to push myself a little bit farther without knowing that I had dyslexia yet. But these professors began to see that I had something different, and began to take me to excavations.

I didn’t know much about it but in the first years of this program you had to go do reconnaissance, you had to go and look for new sites. That was my first job, but during that time, one of our friends who was excavating got sick, and they told me to fill in for him and excavate, and I said “yeah sure.” I went there and told my friend, a Guatemalan student at San Carlos, that I was terrified, because I knew nothing about excavations, but she had more experience and told me not to worry and that she would help me. I remember that we got lost on our way there, and arrived late, and that most of the workers that we needed were gone, all but a couple. And the other people had left, so, oh man, I had to excavate on my own quite a bit. Zacapa is really dry and hot, and there was not a single tree there, and we had to excavate. But we did it.

While I did my excavations, I once found a very small piece of obsidian, and I knew obsidian did not come from that area. It could’ve been trash, but when I found it, my brain was exploding; I was wondering what was going on. It is the same feeling I get today.

The last year at my university in Guatemala, I remember reading the newspaper and I saw an article that was talking about dyslexia and I read it. I told my parents about it and they said “yeah, we think you have that.” So I started to read more about it, to see what the problem was.

Before graduating, Edwin was invited to the US by a peace corps volunteer and stayed with his family while learning English. He spent six months there before returning to Guatemala.

I had been trying to learn English in Guatemala and it was hard. I understood that for dyslexic people, there are certain languages that are difficult, and English was one of them. This family paid a tutor for me, so, with that help, and from talking to people and watching movies, I learned English.

While I was there, one of the directors back in Guatemala told me that I should finish my thesis and graduate, and he offered to fund me while I worked on it. He gave me a month to write my thesis. For four years I didn’t want to do it, but he pushed me to do it, and I finished it. I wrote the entire thesis in 1 month: 116 pages. I finished it and I graduated.

Edwin was able to meet PhD students and professors from the US and elsewhere through his archeological studies and research, and he received help and encouragement from them to keep going and pursue his studies. He made his way to the University of Texas, where he received a PhD.

One of the problems with dyslexia is that it destroys your confidence. I have to say that everything goes back to this dyslexia and I am still trying to understand my life in this context.

There was this PhD student and she told me then that I was a really good leader and she told me that I should pursue a PhD. And of course she was really good looking, so I was like, “yeah.” Two years before I had met a prominent archeologist from the US and I talked with him and told him I would like to study with him, and he said, finish your degree and you can come. So I already had the idea. But In 2008, this PhD student really made me believe that I could do it. Also, when I was on a project and I didn’t have my licenciatura (bachelors) yet, I would be working with people with a PhD, and then I thought “well I could do that.”

My score for the GRE, the examination taken for graduate school, wasn’t any good, it was terrible, but they kept encouraging me. They saw something in me. I applied, and they accepted me. When I arrived I was able to read more about dyslexia and I started to take notes on how I could improve, and I started to have more confidence that I could get the PhD.

I think being in the USA, in higher education, they never asked me specific questions about information. They would ask me, “what do you think?” Since then, I was the nerdiest person you could meet. I was in the library working, working, working. I knew I had to work harder, but also I think the professors there gave me the opportunity to think and show my ideas. That’s what really helped. It was a great experience. You know, PhD programs can be terrible. They are hard and can destroy a lot of your heart. But when I look back, many people helped me.

I think getting the PhD more than anything was a way to prove to myself that I wasn’t dumb. Since I was a kid, I thought that when I was born, the cables in my brain weren’t connected because I had all of these good ideas that I could not express. I would dream of having an accident that would re-unite those cables in my mind so I could prove that I was smart. So I was driven to prove myself. Also, people believed in me and gave me opportunities, and this country (Guatemala) does not give you a lot of opportunities. But when there is a wall there, if the wall has a small crack, I will try to pass through that crack. I think that’s how I got to the University of Texas and to this day, I really still don’t believe I have a PhD. You know, I tell people that I have a PhD and am from a home town that doesn’t even have a library (laughs). That is crazy, you know.

And now I can enjoy life. I can enjoy archeology. Now I think I am back to that kid who finds a small piece of obsidian on his first excavation. I am still that kid, with more experience, more knowledge, and am more secure. I don’t have to prove anything to that old Edwin. And I still can’t believe I went to such a top university. I was really lucky. I had a lot of people who believed in me. We never had money in my family, but I had encouragement.

I don’t know the statistics, but I think we are between 2000 and 3000 people with a PhD in Guatemala. People don’t realize how difficult it is to get this. I met a lot of Guatemalans that come from really difficult backgrounds, and I am lucky. My parents, being teachers, had secure money coming in. I know people who have parents who are poor, small farmers, indigenous, and I have friends who are female and indigenous and they had it much harder, a million times more difficult, than I did. It inspires me a lot to see that they were able to get a PhD with everything against them.

I appeared in a documentary produced by National Geographic regarding the new discoveries on the Maya. There were four episodes, and I was in two of them. People from here were so happy, they were saying how great it was that I, a Guatemalan, was in the documentary speaking on these findings. I was happy also because in my opinion they don’t like to put people in these documentaries who have an accent. In terms of public attention, this documentary put me on the same level as experts in the USA. I didn’t expect it because I was not looking for it. But what I like most is that I don’t have to prove myself to anybody anymore. It feels weird because most of my life I felt like I was dumb and now everyone is complimenting me on my work and I just say, “well, thank you” (laughs). I’m just not used to it.

Dr. Edwin Román-Ramírez at an excavation site in New Mexico.

The Archeologist

Forty-year old Edwin Román-Ramírez is an archeologist who grew up in Chimaltenango, a town of about 75,000 people that lies 30 miles west of the capital, Guatemala City. In the first part of this two-part series, Dr. Román-Ramirez discusses his ideas on Mesoamerican archeology: his work in Zacapa, the public’s impressions of the Maya and his own, and the new technology that is being used to uncover gigantic settlements here-to-fore unknown. He also comments on how funding is difficult to come by for the enormous excavation projects he and others carry out.

Working in Zacapa

Zacapa has a lot of archeological sites, but this area is not well known to many people. We call the people who lived there the Motagua people since the society was near the Motagua River. They are not Mayas, and that is something really interesting to us because when people talk about jade they only talk about Mayas, but these people were extracting jade. They were from another culture apart from the Mayas and they had huge communities, like La Vega del Cobán, which has 800 sites. The Motagua people seem to have been insulated, and they were able to survive for so long. We need to know the relationship between these places, how this culture was able to sustain itself without any interference from the Mayas. We need to think more about which strategies they deployed to communicate and negotiate the politics with the rest of the Maya region.

The earliest evidence we have of the Motagua culture is from 800 BC, and they were there until 900 AD, a really long occupation. When I finished my thesis in 2006, we had discovered 100 sites, and I wrote on the sociopolitical organization that these sites reflected. For me, it was the first experience as an archeologist, being in the field.

I think that now that we have more time and there are more people researching different sites, we can start to understand how complex this society was, but it’s hard to know everything about a culture; there are many unanswered questions.

Impressions of ancient Maya culture

As a culture in general, I love it. Every time I look at some of the pieces of art that they were able to create, I am amazed. From the past to the present, I think they were unusual in their creativity. The way they secured food was so smart also. Many of the things that we enjoy today came from their efforts, like chocolate. Other foods can be associated with Maya innovation in agriculture: tamales, avocados, maiz, tomatoes.

They also were able to adapt to a very difficult environment. I work more in the lowlands, in the Petén region, but all the regions were difficult to live in. When you read a lot of history about Egypt, why were they so successful? Where did they place their cities? They are next to rivers where they can get water to drink and grow crops. But the Maya had to sustain their big cities depending only on the rain during the rainy season.

We have different types of jungles, and in them there are some small islands where the cities were, and there are swamps around the cities we call “bajos” and for some communities, lakes were nearby. So there was water in these bajos during the rainy season, and we know that they were able to create channels in those bajos, and that’s where they were farming. And that’s where they could get their water to sustain the larger communities.

The problem is that for four months you are going to have the dry season, and the rain goes not to the swamps or lakes, it goes to those places that are driest. So it is fascinating to research how they managed to secure water for such large populations during those times.

Take El Mirador, which was one of the largest cities around 300 BC to 200 AD; it’s huge. We don’t see a city that big again during the ancient Maya period. It is so grand and ostentatious. This city had maybe between 60,000 to 100,000 people living there during the year. Tikal is small compared to it. We can see from our measurements of the lakes, how the climate became drier in the year 100 AD, and that is when you see a decline. You see a lot of wars between cities. Maybe it’s harder to get water, and there is fighting. The problem with this period of time is that we don’t have a lot of writing, and the writing that exists doesn’t have those types of narratives about war. The writing we have is “tagging,” tagging people, deities, or objects. They started to write about it later.

The public portrayal of the ancient Maya

Of course, there are a lot of things wrong about how people see Maya culture. We can talk about movies, which will always reflect what the director wants to show. For example, Apocalypto, a film on the ancient Maya. Much of the history was wrong, but I think some of it was cool. You have this huge movie, a Hollywood production, where you can hear Yucatec Maya throughout the entire film. I think that’s good. When we look at some of the ways that the movie portrayed the kings, they are how we imagine them. I liked that part; the director did that well. And there are also documentaries that are good.

What I don’t like is that a lot of the movie (and other productions) focused on the theme of sacrifice, and every culture has had some type of sacrifice. Even Christian cultures did. For Mayas, we know a lot of sacrifices happened, but the problem is that sometimes we only show that. It’s discouraging because it will reinforce the stereotype that some people are less civilized and people will use that feeling to continue to discriminate against indigenous people today. But the popular media are never going to show that western cultures engaged in sacrifices. It has been part of human evolution, the history of mankind.

Archeologists have to be careful about this subject. For example, once we were working and we found the tomb of the founder of the dynasty at my site, and seven children had been sacrificed beside the king. We had to issue this press release in the National Palace, and we had to report it because it was true, but we were trying to be careful about how we were going to say it. I remember the directors (like myself), we were trying to position the information so that it would not get the attention. We did the press release and we didn’t mention a lot about it. Some of the news came on an hour later — and we have social media now that makes the news even more immediate — and the media reported that seven kids were scarified with the royal king! We tried to play it down so the media would not go there, but they went there.

Innovations in Mesoamerican archeology

Our understanding of these civilizations is constantly evolving. We thought we knew a lot, but there are always developments that create a new paradigm and shifts our understanding of what happened. For example, there was a big break in archeology when we were able to date people and events using carbon 14. That was a big change around the world.

In Maya history, there was a great shift in the 1980s, when, after a long process, we were able to read glyphs. Now we could read the history and were able to make new assumptions. That changed a lot of our understanding of Maya culture.

Carbon-14 dating is a technique that provides age estimates for carbon-based material that originated from living organisms. First developed in the late 1940s, the method revolutionized knowledge of the past. The glyphs, or Mayan writing, are made up of symbols that represent syllables and words. These glyphs are often found on walls, bark paper, and ceramics, and they were sometimes carved into wood and stone.

Today there is a new change: the technology to map sites. Now we have LiDAR (short for Light Detection and Ranging), a system of deploying lasers from an airplane to create images of what is below the jungle. It’s like an MRI, when you go to a doctor and they can scan your entire body to see what is inside. That is what is happening with LiDAR.

In the Petén, the jungle is really thick and structures that are 10 meters tall can be lost. Before LiDAR, we were not able to see everything because the jungle masked it, like areas where they were farming. We know that the Maya were farmers, and at some sites we can see the areas where they engaged in agriculture, but we only knew that because we were excavating there. It was by luck.

With LiDAR we can penetrate the different layers of the jungle: the top, middle and bottom. We are able to recognize two phenomena that we were unable to see previously. First, we can hone in and view the smallest structures and modifications and the exact locations of where they were farming. We can see terraces and things like that. Second, we can scope out and see really large structures. Maybe we could see a part of something before, but we could not see the whole. The area would be so large that we could not see it from our perspective on the ground. Now we can see structures like defensive walls or channels to conduct water that can be two kilometers long.

What LiDAR can do is to remove digitally all the jungle, and then you have all the surface and any and every change that occurred. And this technology is still being developed. In the future we will have better LiDAR. But it is a very important technology because we can see entire cities. We can see not just monuments or some group of houses. Now we can see some 60 structures at once. Where I work at El Palmar on the Yucatán peninsula, findings from LiDAR made us change a lot in a book we were writing. For instance, we used to say this site was very small compared to Tikal, but now we know that El Palmar has 920 more structures to it than we thought. It was about the same size as Tikal, but we were not able to see it before.

The funding challenge

Archeology is really expensive. It cannot be done by one person, like in other fields, say history. It requires a greater investment. We need to pay workers for the excavation process. We need excavators, helpers, cooks, drivers, and the number we need changes year to year. Sometimes we need 45 to 50 people.

We know funding has to come from the government, something that we don’t have much of here. There is a Ministry of Sports and Culture that receives less than one percent of the national budget, and that one percent has to be divided among dance, painting, the symphony, everything that is culturally related, and sports as well, which takes up 60 percent of that amount that is already less than 1 percent.

We do have money coming in from private donors in Guatemala as well as international sources. We have private donors from the USA and others parts of the world, and also you have people that get grants from foundations. In the USA you can get grants from the NEH (the National Endowment of the Humanities), and the NSF (National Science Foundation), and from Europe they have their own places to get money.

The Guatemalan state does help, but it is not very much. I think the institution in charge of archeology is doing everything it can, but it has to pay a lot of guards to protect the sites. So most of the money does not go to research, but rather to pay the salaries of people who are taking care of the archeological locations in different regions of Guatemala. I think the president should raise the budget to maybe two percent.

The archeology being carried out by Guatemalans is very new; we started in the 1970s. Here in Guatemala we have two universities dedicated to archeological research: San Carlos and Del Valle. Before that, there were archeologists, but they were from the outside. Actually, most Guatemalans think archeologists come only from a foreign country and they cannot conceive of a Guatemalan archeologist. They simply cannot believe it. But now there are about 250 of us, and we are learning more and more about our ancient past.

Edwin Román Ramirez, Antigua, Guatemala, June 10, 2019.