This will be the last installment in the Yaxchilan expedition field notes. For the last couple of days, we've been making our way from that magnificent Maya city on the border of Guatemala and Mexico back to Boston.

A few at a time, expedition members have been going their own way. The Mexican contingent, along with Ian Graham, left on Monday, the last afternoon we were at Yaxchilan. Alex and Vicky left Copán with the scanning equipment Wednesday morning. Justin and I hung back for another day to re-visit the ruins at Rastrojón and see the progress there.

As I write, we're aboard the flight from Miami to Boston. The trip home has gone much more smoothly than the flight down, with an easy trip from San Pedro Sula to Miami. We left the Fashes in Miami, as they headed off to a conference in Texas for a few days before returning to Boston themselves.

Throughout the trip, I have been impressed with Bill and Barbara Fash. They seem as dedicated to the people around them as they are to their scholarship, to the well-being of their host countries, and to the preservation and understanding of ancient Maya culture. At every step of the way, they have facilitated not only the accomplishment of the expedition's goals, but also the individual success of its members in their assigned tasks.

It was not unusual to see Bill standing for an hour or longer in the hot sun, holding a corner of a tarp so that Vicky and others involved with the scanning could do their job. He lugged gear from the boats to the scanning site and from the scanning site to the boats, sometimes relieving others of their load along the way.

Their support was a key factor in allowing Justin and me to report and photograph the expedition. They showed considerable patience with me, explaining not only the long and complex history of the Maya at Yaxchilan and Copán, but also the archaeological history of the sites, and the modern cultural contexts and sensitivities. They are teachers in the broadest and best sense of the word.

"If you want to play around and start putting things together, go for it," Barbara Fash said.

She was sitting in the thin shade cast by a small tree at Rastrojón, the site of the new dig overseen by Peabody Museum director William Fash and his Honduran co-director Jorge Ramos.

Sitting on the tumbled stones of the Copán Valley's latest archaeological site were Harvard graduate students Dylan Clark and Molly Fierer-Donaldson. Fash was going over procedures with them on how to handle pieces of sculpture at the site, reviewing the detailed record-keeping, marking, and tagging that allows archaeologists to understand not just the piece itself, but its context in relation to the site and to other pieces around it.

Rastrojón appears to offer plenty. In the week since we last visited the site, more underbrush had been cleared, further revealing the sites' mounds and the building stones sticking from the ground almost everywhere.

Bill Fash walked the site, evaluating the pits Molly and Dylan, together with Jorge and the crew of local Honduran workers, had already begun. One pit, roughly 4 feet square was marked with posts at each corner, with string strung from post to post. The most advanced on the site, it had been dug to 10 inches or so, revealing a white and gray mosaic of building stones against the dark earth. Running diagonally across the pit were what appeared to be the stacked stones of a tumbled wall.

At seeing the wall, Molly and Dylan had stopped work because these initial pits were supposed to be dug near but not on the structures themselves. They were intended to uncover pieces that had fallen from the buildings as they had collapsed.

Bill directed them to stop excavating that pit and to begin a replacement pit at another spot.

It was hot - 90 degrees in the shade at the Fashes' house in Copán - but the crew worked steadily. Several pits had been staked out at different places on the site, and digging was beginning on the second pit as we arrived.

With Molly overseeing, two workers removed an organic layer of leaves and twigs covering the dirt. Then they began to remove the upper layers of soil, digging deliberately with small shovels and picks. They put the earth into a metal bucket and took it over to another worker who manned a screen set into a wooden frame. Using a trowel, the worker broke up the clumps and sorted through the dirt, letting the smallest bits fall through the screen.

The graduate students plan to work through the end of the dry season. The rains are expected in May, which is when the digging will stop. The Fashes plan to bring a summer field school to the site in late July and August, when things dry out enough to start digging again.

Perched on the side of a hill with a commanding view of the Copán Valley, Rastrojón seems to be an exciting mystery. Though the site itself is fairly small, stones poke through the ground a long way down the hillside below. It may be the case, Bill said, that though there is no large elevated acropolis, steps were terraced into the hillside, incorporating the hill to create an imposing acropolis-like structure, similar to what exists at Yaxchilan.

It's up to Dylan and Molly to get things started, dig the test pits, and, under Bill and Barbara's tutelage, begin to tell the story of what went on at Rastrojón.

After the visit to Rastrojón, it was time to say goodbye to Copán. Together with the Fashes, Justin and I piled into the minibus that would take us back to San Pedro Sula.

We got into San Pedro Sula a bit later than expected, though with enough time for dinner and an early return to our rooms to get ready for our flight tomorrow.

Today was a travel day and things pretty much went as planned. We traveled by boat, pickup truck, and small plane, retracing our steps from Frontera Corozal, Mexico, to Copán Ruinas, Honduras, the base for the Peabody's long-running project on the Maya ruins at Copán.

The first part of the morning went as the others on this expedition have. We rose early and had breakfast, but when we boarded the boats, they turned upriver toward Peten, Guatemala, where the airstrip was, rather than downriver to Yaxchilan.

We again marveled at the skill of the small-plane pilot setting down smoothly on the rough dirt strip. An hour later we were at the Guatemalan/Honduran border, landing at a grass strip much closer to our destination than had been the airstrip at Chiquimula, Guatemala, that we had used on the trip out.

Today, instead of the major border crossing between Honduras and Guatemala we faced on the way to Yaxchilan - complete with passport and baggage checks - our return to Honduras was marked with only a modest "Welcome to Honduras" sign on the dirt road from the airstrip. Thirty bumpy minutes later, after dodging a herd of cows that wanted to use the same one-lane bridge we were on, we were back in Copán Ruinas.

The team plans to take the opportunity to try the scanner out on the hieroglyphic steps at Copán, which would be one of the first major projects undertaken with the scanners now that the trial is over. Needing time to catch up and write, I passed on the trip and stayed back at the hotel.

Tomorrow we visit the dig that was just beginning at Rastrojón when we left Copán last week. We'll see what progress they've made and then spend our last night back at San Pedro Sula to catch an early flight back to the United States on Thursday.

Today was our final day of work at Yaxchilan and, though there were still two monuments that the team wanted to scan, the fact that the scanning process had already proved itself meant to some extent the pressure was off.

Of course that's not to say that the task was particularly easy. The two chosen monuments were near Building 33, thought to be a temple erected at the height of the city's power under the rule of Bird Jaguar IV during the eighth century.

Two problems presented themselves, the first - that the monuments were located on the grand acropolis waaaaay above the main plaza - was solved by simple effort. With perhaps a sigh or two, but not a single complaint, team members lugged the gear all the way up the long staircase leading to Building 33.

The second problem was not so easily solved. The stela, unique in that the carvings were engraved on a stalactite hauled from a cave rather than on a broad, flat stone like other stelae, was in the middle of the plaza, at first shaded by a nearby tree, but soon in the full sun.

Daylight, again, plagued the effort. It seems that some monuments, depending on their location, shape, and orientation to the sun, present a tremendous amount of difficulty in shading them enough so that the scanner can read them properly. One of the things learned on this trip is that some monuments are best scanned at night.

The team managed several scans of the stela before lunch, but not before erecting a wide variety of contraptions involving tarps, sticks from the nearby forest, duct tape, and rope.

After lunch came the scan of the large, long hieroglyphic-inscribed stair just before the building's entrance. Long and low, already partly covered to shade the steps from the weather, the monument required just a bit more shading - and then the scans could begin. By 3:30 p.m. the work was done. And with that, the scanning equipment could be packed away.

The team began to break up even before the scanning was complete, with the Mexican contingent, along with Ian Graham, taking one boat back to Frontera Corozal. From the town they would drive to Palenque and travel on from there.

There's seven of us remaining and tomorrow morning we take the boat back across the river to the airstrip in Guatemala to begin the trip back to Copán.

After a long overnight of photography at Yaxchilan, I was ready to head back to Frontera Corozal and a cool shower. Al and I were up until about 2 a.m., using a tripod and flashlights to light up different ruins, and getting mixed but interesting results. It was the first time I'd tried this type of shooting, and I was excited despite the flashes of lightning and the continued sounds of bats buzzing by our heads.

The rest of the team joined us early, bringing along a breakfast of quesadillas and salsa for "overnighters," and work began at the ball court with the 3-D scanner. Taking a moment to find some shade in the early morning heat, I could see Ian Graham alone across the grand plaza pulling something from a large box in front of Temple 21. Not sure what was happening, I wandered over toward Ian.

Halfway there I realized that he had in front of him his camera suitcase, and was pulling out an old Hasselblad 500 C, a classic two-and-a-quarter film camera. I quickly made a few frames of him from a good distance as he slipped through the entryway and into the temple, and made my way up the stairs. I found Ian, who had slipped past the clear plastic bars put up to keep tourists out of the inner sanctum of the temple, his face shoved into the viewfinder of his Hasselblad and his back against the wall, trying to focus on the colorful stucco murals in front of him.

"I wish I had color film," he said, motioning at the pastel colors faded into the wall, as I leaned over the barrier to get a shot of him. I moved down two entryways, to try and respect his space as a photographer, and slipped under the plastic bars. Ian was working quickly, making images of each side of the stucco murals, and a small glyph on the lower part of the wall.

Fumbling with the viewfinder a bit, he turned to me and said, "I'm trying to remember all the moves with the camera that I didn't have to remember before," continuing, "it's been so long since I've used it, I can't quite recall which button to push."

We both finished up in the next few minutes, he with images he's been making for the last 40 years, and me watching and learning from a photographic icon in the world of archaeology and the Maya. As he prepared to slip back under the bars, he turned to me and said, "If I was really thinking I would have brought a branch to cover up our footsteps," pointing to the ultra-fine sand on the floor that had captured every move we made since we had crossed the barriers. I turned and found, behind a wall, a palm leaf, and went to work erasing our footprints as I backed away from the center. When Ian saw what I was doing, he said, "You don't want to do too good a job, otherwise they'll know there were professionals who had covered their tracks."

Professionals indeed. How lucky I was to be a professional today.

FRONTERA COROZAL, Mexico - The boats headed upriver at 5:15 Saturday afternoon. Justin and I watched them leave from a small platform high above the river.

The sound of the outboard faded, leaving us alone amid Yaxchilan's ruins. We had decided to join a few other members of the team spending the night at the ancient Maya city. The darkness, it seems, allows one to better control the light falling on a monument, making for better photographs.

The other members of our team had headed off to begin the process, photographing monuments nearby, so Justin and I were alone in the grand plaza, waiting for dark.

The first sign of evening at Yaxchilan is not a dimming of the daylight. Instead, it is an ever-so-slight cooling, as if someone had filed the edge off the heat of the day.

Eventually, of course, the sun does grow dimmer as it slides westward, falling behind the trees and then the hills that tower over the site. The heat of the day lessens noticeably, but it never really becomes cool. Even later, in the plaza under the sliver of an orange-red moon, the heat enveloped us.

The stone buildings grew slowly darker around us, but the place never really seemed frightening.

Long ago at the city's peak the scene must have been very different. The city plaza was very likely alive with life at this time of evening. Today's hollow ruins, though impressive, are just a shadow of their former selves. Back then, their stonework was plastered smooth and painted bright colors. There would have been people in the plaza attending to business, conducting the familiar commerce of human life, all overseen by rulers in the buildings above.

But tonight, aside from Justin and me, the plaza belonged to the birds, who flew over in twos and threes to some evening feeding tree or favorite roost as the shadows grew long. Then howler monkeys came down from the forests above, climbing across the tops of the few trees left in the plaza, moving from branch to branch and tree to tree as we would step on stones across a stream. They traversed the plaza high in the trees, to a large tree bordering the river near the ancient ball court where Justin and I waited for dark.

As the howlers settled in for the night, we decided to find our companions. They took a break from their work and we all settled around a table at the spacious covered patio used by the watchmen there. We ate by flashlight, food from the hotel augmented by crackers with tuna and precious bottled water. After supper, our team members continued their photography work. Justin and I observed for a while and then set out again, touring the plaza as Justin photo-painted the buildings and stelae with a flashlight and an open lens. I held the light, pushed the shutter when told, and tried not to get bitten by a spider - I saw at least two large ones - or a bat, which occasionally swirled past our heads.

I slept pretty well in one of the small houses that are near the watchman's quarters. This morning, while waiting for the boats to return, I worked on the profile of Ian Graham that is part of the package of stories we're creating about the expedition. It seemed fitting somehow to be writing about Graham, something of a legend in Maya archaeology, while in Yaxchilan itself.

YAXCHILAN, Mexico - The rain forest is full of cheeps and peeps and roars and bellows. The wildlife here lets you know you're in the tropics.

The howler monkeys are the best example, with their long-range bellows impossible to ignore. They fill the forest air even as I write, sitting on a steplike structure near the stela where the scanning continues.

But other creatures like to join the chorus, too. Birds add different voices in rising and falling cascades of sound. Foot-long lizards skitter through the dry fallen leaves, sounding larger than they appear when they emerge from the forest onto a fallen log or a stone of the ancient city. Even the insects - cicadas I'm told - get in on the act. They don't cheep or peep so much as rev up, starting slow and then speeding up into an almost metallic screech. First you hear one, and then another and another until their collective cacophony gives the howlers a run for their money.

But perhaps the most memorable sound was a single soft peep. It was memorable because I first heard it in the complete darkness of the cool, black passages of "the Labyrinth," the first of Yaxchilan's buildings I encountered.

The Labyrinth provided a memorable journey into darkness and an encounter with quite a few bats that call the building their daytime resting place.

There are two paths to get into Yaxchilan. One hugs the bank of the Usumacinta, running along the bluffs above the river and leading to the city's main courtyard. The second strays deeper among the towering trees of the rain forest and leads through the Labyrinth. One of the best-preserved buildings at the site, the Labryinth is so named because of its twisting and turning corridors, which, because there are no windows, lead through utter darkness.

It was while in this darkness for the first time, senses straining for some sign of what was around me, that I heard the single, soft peep. I didn't know what it was and I stumbled through the darkness to emerge into the city's main courtyard, made all the more dramatic by the gloom from which I emerged.

The next time through, I had the presence of mind to pull out a flashlight before entering and, hearing the peep again, shone it upward to see several small black bats hanging just a few feet away.

Intrigued, I looked in other corridors and saw more and more bats. Once I began looking, I saw bats in many of the other buildings I visited, though after a peep or two, they fly off if you get too close.

Though we haven't heard them, we've also seen several crocodiles lying on the banks of the Usumacinta as we ride up and down the river in our outboard canoes. The crocodiles, which seem to always be on the Mexican side, handle our attention in different ways. Some just sit and wait for us to go away as our boatman brings the boat closer for us to take a look. Others endure the attention for a moment, and then plop into the river, disappearing under the Usumacinta's green waters.

The Usumacinta this morning took us to what felt like the first "normal" workday here. Though Vicky had managed to calibrate the scanner back at the hotel, it still hadn't been tried on an actual Maya monument. With that hurdle out of the way, members of the team were finally free to disperse to other tasks, while Alex and Vicky continued their scanning of Stela 11. That job took more and more time as it proceeded, since the file grew with each scan, gradually causing the computer to slow.

We set off in different groups, Justin and I following Ian and Barbara and other members of the team through the forest to a more remote acropolis, to look for a stela that was buried in the 1980s to protect it from weathering and looters. They dug a bit, looking for it, while Barbara examined the carvings on one of the site's stelae that was still standing.

At the end of the day, I had somewhat mixed feelings as Justin, myself, and three other members of the team, Carlos, Hugo, and Alex, remained behind while the others called it a day. The plan was to stay and photograph monuments at night, when the darkness would make it easy to light the stelae just right to bring out their relief. Justin and I were staying with the team members to record this phase of the expedition's activities.

At about 5:30, we stood on the bank and watched the boats pull away. Night was coming to Yaxchilan.

FRONTERA COROZAL, Mexico - "Grab the rope and pull!"

The tone in Barbara Fash's voice made me grab the rope and pull, even though I wasn't exactly sure why I was pulling.

The area around Stela 11 was abuzz with activity. In fact, it was that activity that drew me from across Yaxchilan's plaza where I had been talking with Maria Teresa Uriarte, a Mexican collaborator of Barbara's and a dean at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

I pulled, but the rope wouldn't move - it had been looped over the guy wire that held a tarp in place to keep leaves, rain, and the sun off the stela. I thought about pulling harder, but didn't think yanking the tarp down onto our assembled group, the stela, and the scanning equipment would go over very well.

Instead, we pulled the rope back off the guy wire and looped it around a nearby tree, so that the heavy brown tarp created a curtain that shaded the stela from the late morning sunlight.

A few moments later it became clear to me what was going on - and there were smiles all around.

Those charged with setting up the scanner had worked through the morning, getting the generator running, setting up the scanner on its tripod, and hooking up the laptop that ran the software controlling the equipment.

But the initial scans had come out incomplete, with "holes" in them, as Barbara described it.

The problem, it turns out, was too much light hitting the stela, which was lying on the ground, propped up at a slight angle for easy viewing.

The impromptu curtain - and a second on the other side held up by two members of the team - took care of that.

The smiles came when the next scans came in. And, as the morning wore on, more and more of the stela showed up on the laptop's screen, with its relief in sharp detail.

Members of the team gathered to watch, smiling, telling jokes, and peering over Basiliki Vicky Karas' shoulder as she tapped at the laptop, blending the images from the different scans into one.

Today, finally, after some unforeseen difficulties, it appeared that the equipment was working properly. Barbara smiled in relief. A few moments later, she reflected on the hardships faced by those trying to preserve Yaxchilan's monuments in years past.

"The previous way to make a copy was with a paper mold," she said of the process where they'd press wet paper to the monuments in several layers and then dry the paper before peeling it off, creating hard molds from which plaster casts could be made. "That was hard, too, lugging in all that paper and the water and lighting the fire to dry it."

No fires needed at Yaxchilan on Friday.

FRONTERA COROZAL, Mexico - It worked.

Those two simple words brought smiles to nearly a dozen sweaty, tired faces as we walked up the long hill from the boats beached on the Usumacinta River that forms the border between Mexico and Guatemala and that is our highway to the Maya ruins at Yaxchilan.

We had spent our first full day at Yaxchilan, muggy, but bearable because of overcast skies. A team of archaeologists from several nations was spread out across the site, laboring amid Yaxchilan's crumbled majesty.

There was work to be done. Drawings made years ago of different Maya monuments at Yaxchilan had to be checked against modern standards. Inscriptions that hadn't been recorded had to be carefully drawn, their graceful lines preserved against the ravages of time and weather.

What we weren't doing was scanning the monuments. During critical calibrations conducted Wednesday (April 18) night, the scanner had balked. Basiliki Vicky Karas, a Smithsonian consultant assisting the expedition, had stayed behind to work with it.

When the calibration stalled Wednesday evening, Bill Fash had said philosophically that the reason they were having the field trial for the equipment was to work the bugs out.

Still, there was no doubt that everyone had hoped it would work flawlessly. But given the flights, the boat rides, the people from several nations that had all made it to Frontera Corozal on time and in good shape, it was perhaps asking too much that everything go smoothly.

Alexandre Tokovinine, an Anthropology Department graduate student who plans to conduct subsequent scanning efforts in the field, said that should the equipment prove balky, it would mean the University wouldn't buy it and would look for another vendor.

It wouldn't mean the scanning project would stop.

I managed to tour the ruins with Alex during the day. It was quite an experience. As an epigrapher, Alex is an expert at reading Maya hieroglyphics. It was an amazing experience to walk through Yaxchilan with him, stopping again and again to read the Maya story written over a thousand years ago.

Bill Fash sat with Justin and me for a while, talking about the history of Yaxchilan, its continued importance today, and, because of the presence of many different kinds of Maya art and carvings, its appropriateness as a site for a trial of the equipment. He also indicated that the scanning effort would carry on, whatever happened with this particular machine. It was, quite simply, the future of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program and a critical effort to preserve, in three dimensions, these fading monuments.

I also got a chance to commune with a troop of howler monkeys, who swung into the trees near an impressive building that towers above the main group of ruins, reached after a climb of 135 steps - I counted. The howlers, native to this rain forest, moved in, eating the leaves of surrounding trees. Apparently unconcerned with Justin's and my presence, they politely posed for pictures.

It doesn't take long to understand how howlers get their name. Their bellows - closer to roars, actually - demand your attention. When the howlers start, the birds stop, or maybe you just can't hear them over the monkeys.

Though work went on at Yaxchilan Thursday, there's no denying everyone hoped to get the scanner in the field and run it there for a try. That was on my mind and I'd guess everyone else's as we rode up the river 45 minutes back to the hotel, where we had left Vicky in midmorning to wrestle with whatever demons were possessing the equipment.

When we got there, the demons were gone. Vicky had good news. After several hours' effort, she'd managed to calibrate the machine. And it was ready to go.

Tomorrow the scanner goes to Yaxchilan.

FRONTERA COROZAL, Mexico — The Usumacinta River runs muddy-green along the border between Guatemala and Mexico. It is wide and flat, about the size of New England’s Connecticut River, but green and swirling with eddies and whirlpools that speak of hidden rocks below.

We took several boat rides today, since boat is the only way to reach Yaxchilan, the ancient Maya city that is our final destination in a three-day journey that began Monday morning in the howling rain in Boston.

I was glad for the boat rides, because in addition to providing a way to see the area, the outboard-driven vessels were cool. It is hot, sweaty work the archaeologists do in this area.

The rain forest provides a shroud around Yaxchilan that keeps out prying eyes. We caught just one glimpse of a stone building from the river. Blackened with age, it appeared briefly through a break in the trees. A moment later it was gone.

Off the boat, the ruins are reached through a narrow path. One gets their first glimpse of a building, perhaps two or three stories tall, through a v-shaped cut in the short trail that leads to the site from the river landing.

Yaxchilan has a very different feel from Copán.

The forest presses in from all sides. Towering trees spring from the city’s plazas, shading the area. The buildings are smaller than the massive Copán acropolis. Yaxchilan feels more intimate. One has to walk through a building to get into the courtyard, feeling one’s way along a darkened passageway to emerge into the daylight.

Tomorrow we’ll break out the scanning equipment that brought us here in the first place. The hope is that the scanner will be portable enough to be usable in the field and will successfully re-create the many carvings as digital files that can be “printed out” on a three-dimensional printer.

It took most of the day to get to Yaxchilan. We started just after 8 a.m. in Copán, Honduras, and the boat bumped ashore on the sandy beach below Yaxchilan’s bluffs at around 5 p.m.

Our two-car convoy reached the Guatemala border after a short drive from Copán. The drivers got out with a stack of our passports and, after a short wait, they returned from the cluster of low buildings that made up the checkpoint, all smiles. We’d cleared customs, no problem.

We drove from the dirt parking onto the road and toward the long metal pole that swung up to let you pass. The first car, a minibus, got through, but the second, a pickup carrying most of our gear, was stopped.

As the minutes ticked by, with those of us in the minibus a few yards up the road in Guatemala and the pickup with the equipment just behind us, but still in Honduras, we began to wonder what went wrong.

Ian Graham offered a song to break the tension, and we listened as he sang, a cappella, about a lost love and England’s “foggy, foggy dew.”

The delay took only a few more moments and we were off, winding through the dry hills of Guatemala.

The airport at Chiquimula was an hour or so away along the floor of a valley bordered by short, steep hills. It was a bright sunny day that, judging by the brown grass and undergrowth covering the hills, was just the latest in a long string of them.

I remember the first dry season I experienced. I was living in Kenya and, as the months wore on and the country grew browner, it felt as if I was drying out, too. By the time the rains came, quite abruptly, it felt as if my very soul was parched. I remember being elated at the rain and joined my students outside in the deluge.

We reached Chiquimula’s airport behind schedule, but Guatemala City had been fogged in that morning so the plane was also late.

We pulled into what looked like a wide, long vacant lot, paved down the middle with an aging asphalt strip. There was a single small building with a small plane parked next to it.

The plane was clearly too small for the eight in our group, so we parked and waited. It took only a few moments before a white Cessna soared into view, swooping in a long curving arc, banking hard to line up with the landing strip and setting down, kicking up bits of gravel as it roared past us.

We loaded the gear and climbed into the 12-seater and took off. Though the plane was small, the flight was smooth, and we quickly passed over mountains and plains and hit the Usumacinta River. We followed the river to a landing strip in Guatemala slightly upriver and across from Frontera Corozal, Mexico, where we’d be based for five or six days.

I know now it was a landing strip because the plane landed on it. From the air, though, the strip looked like a dirt road: twin brown tracks running through a field, with soldiers on either side to keep the cows out.

We lined up and, despite my disbelief, set down, kicking up dirt, small rocks, and bits of dry grass in a cloud that obscured the windows. We bounced down the track and came to a halt, turning into a small grassy area just big enough for the plane and the trucks that would take us to Usumacinta.

A few minutes later, we were on the river for our first boat trip of the day. We had piled ourselves and our gear into two long narrow, outboard-driven boats. The boats are five or six feet wide and 25 to 30 feet long. Painted red and white and other colors, they are topped by an open canopy made of interwoven palm fronds.

After a short, pleasant trip downriver, we pulled ashore across the river, on the Mexican side, where the hotel lies, and, further downriver, Yaxchilan.

Morning comes early in Copán. It starts with the early bird, the first rooster to find his voice, usually when it's still dark, though if you try, you can detect the first glimmerings of morning, the first lightening of the dark outside.

Other roosters soon join the chorus, then other birds. Barking dogs provide the punctuation. The world is waking up and clearing its throat. The chorus has barely subsided as I write. I'm sending this dispatch before we leave Copán for Yaxchilan, since it may be difficult to get an outside connection there. Justin and I will send what we can, when we can.

Last night, we piled into the project's small pickup truck and headed to a restaurant perched on a shoulder overlooking the Copán valley to watch the sun set behind the hills.

The evening was hazy as smoke from the many wildfires drifted down the valley to the west, causing the sun to set as a smoldering red ball. As it grew dark, the lights of Copán came on in the valley floor and the red glow of the wildfires on the mountains across the valley could be seen. First one, then another, and another.

It's the end of the dry season here and fires, some set to clear land for agriculture, gobble up the tinder dry grasses and brush. They'll likely burn until they run out of fuel or the rains come, expected in May. Before the sun set, we could look down into the valley from the restaurant's perch and see the main ruins, where Justin and I had stood with Barbara Fash earlier in the day looking across at the restaurant. A story Barbara told as we walked spoke to the durability of these monuments.

We were at the base of one of the large main structures, walking around it on the grassy plaza, and came across an opening, perhaps two feet square, creating a small tunnel horizontally into the base of the monument. Barbara said that was a drain hole - the entire plaza was slightly tilted so water drained off to this corner. The drain, she said, was still working, and in fact, was so important to the site that when it once got clogged, water backed up almost to the hieroglyphic stairway. They ultimately had to send a small guy in, a rope attached to his foot, to clear the clog.

We leave by truck and bus in a half hour for an hour-long ride to an airfield just over the Guatemalan border, near a town named Chiquimula. From there, it's a charter flight into Mexico and then a short ride to Frontera Corozal, the small town near Yaxchilan where we'll be staying. From there, we'll be working at Yaxchilan until our return to Copán on Tuesday (April 24).

Our first full day in Copán started early with roosters crowing, and morning light streaming in the window. Though the ceiling fan ran all night, the heat remained trapped in my room and I was eager to get out into the fresh air. I skipped an early shower, knowing I'd be sweating from the afternoon heat and would need one before dinner, grabbed some gear, and headed out to investigate town at 6:10 a.m.

The air was warm. Kids dressed in blue pants and white shirts were coming from all directions of town, heading to different schools depending, I imagined, on their age. I followed a couple of them, looking for interesting photos, and passing out a few Hershey's Kisses I had brought just for that purpose.

By 7:15, I had walked most of the town and was heading back for breakfast before meeting up with Bill and Barbara. Very "norte-americano" of the Fashes, they arrived outside our hotel at 8:30 and we headed out to the main Copán ruins.

We met with the local director of the regional archaeology agency, as the Fashes had to get a permission form for equipment that was coming into the country that day in San Pedro Sula. After exchanging pleasantries, Bill explained that we were the first "international expedition" that the Gazette had sent, and showed him last week's story. Attentive and suitably impressed, Oscar Cruz, reached into his drawer and drew out a day pass for Al and me.

Barbara, who first arrived in Copán in the mid-1970s, was our guide, and it seemed that everyone knew her. She led us on our private tour, explaining what happened when and what ruler was in charge of Copán at particular times as she pointed out some of the more clearly defined Maya glyphs. What struck me like a ton of bricks was that we were in the middle of one of the most amazing sites in Mesoamerica with someone who was an expert in the field, and who had actually dug, recovered, and restored much of what was in front of us. The realization that we were exploring a place with one of its original explorers was an amazing feeling, and underscored for me the value and importance of this kind of trip.

Tomorrow is a travel day, from Copán to Yaxchilan, and I'm looking forward to it with even more eager anticipation after today.

Today was a day to see the "bigger picture" of the Yaxchilan trip. The digital scanning technology being tested at Yaxchilan will, if successful, be put into use at Copán, as well as other Maya sites.

Barbara Fash walked Justin and me through the main ruins, which are enormous, elegant, and plainly a bit stunning when you emerge from the short walk from the forest into the main plaza. What a site they must have been when they were first built, painted white and red, a startling statement of the power of the central government to all who saw them.

As we walked, Barbara gave us a bit of history about her and her husband, Bill. They started in Copán 30 years ago and have spent much of their professional careers there, though they worked elsewhere before coming to Harvard in the mid 1990s.

The trip served another purpose as well. We had to visit the archaeological park director Oscar Cruz to get permission to bring in the scanner. Two other members of the crew are bringing the scanner into the country and, without the permit, they may be held up in customs.

The afternoon was spent at a new archaeological site up the valley a bit. Its tumbled stones gave me a new appreciation of how difficult it is to make sense of a place that has had nature and time work its will on it for millennia. Still, the archaeologists there, while working with Honduran officials to formulate a work plan, were able to point out several significant aspects of the site.

The site, Rastrojón, must have been beautiful when it was occupied. It is perched on the shoulder of a mountain that forms one side of the Copán Valley, and provides a breathtaking view of the way we drove in yesterday, though I couldn't make out the stela that we stopped at.

Since the project's only truck was in San Pedro Sula, we had to pile into the back of the Honduran government pickup of the officials we met at the site. Justin and I, Bill Fash, and two graduate students shared the back of the pickup truck bed, bouncing down the local streets and over the cobblestones back to the hotel.

Tonight, the crew gets ready for an early departure tomorrow aboard a charter flight to Mexico, where we will begin the trip's main mission - testing the scanning equipment at Yaxchilan.

Morning came hard today, our travel day to Honduras and the Peabody Museum's archaeological project at the Maya ruins at Copán. The spring Nor'easter had screamed across Boston Harbor all night, driving rain into the windows and shaking the house with repeated gusts. Each shaking woke my 1-year-old daughter, meaning the three-plus hours of sleep I had resigned would be my lot wound up fragmented and lost.

The alarm provided the expected rude awakening at 3:15 a.m., and I staggered through my shower and, a few minutes later, dressed and ready, stood at the front door, looking out at the storm, waiting for the taxi.

By 4:15 a.m. I was at the airport and, a short time later, had found my Harvard News Office colleague Justin Ide and the Fashes, Bill and Barbara. Bill is the director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, while Barbara is the director of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program. Together, they have been exploring the ruins of the ancient Maya city of Copán and their associated carvings for 30 years. It was to observe their work in Copán and at the Mexican Maya site of Yaxchilan that Justin, the Harvard News Office's chief photographer, and I had climbed out of bed at such an ungodly hour.

Bill showed up pushing a chest-high stack of suitcases on a luggage cart, full of gear for the trip, including, among other things, a generator to run the scanning equipment that they hoped to use at the ruins at Yaxchilan, in Chiapas, Mexico.

But before going to Mexico, we planned a stopover at Copán, where the Fashes' dedication has resulted not only in a new understanding of the Maya who inhabited the Copán, but in a new sculpture museum that we are planning on visiting tomorrow.

But first to get there.

The rain pounded on the airport windows, with powerful gusts of wind flexing the glass. We chatted while we waited for the plane, but I think we were all surprised when they called our flight and, instead of telling us the weather was so bad we had to go home, put us on the plane and took off.

After a few bumps, we climbed above the clouds. It was a beautiful morning 30,000 feet above Boston, sunny and clear. The tops of the storm clouds looked like a jumbled white mountain range below.

We descended back into the tempest for a layover in Washington, D.C., and then, after a short wait, were back up through the storm again, bumping and dipping, until we were clear of the clouds. We descended again into Miami to change planes for San Pedro Sula, where we'd arrive in Honduras at last.

Justin commented when we got here, after 15 hours in transit, that it was one heck of a commute to work. The Fashes have been making this trip for a long time, though. They've been working in Copán for about 30 years, spending eight months a year there.

After another two-plus hours in the air, the plane neared San Pedro Sula. I was a bit disappointed that the day was overcast, but my disappointment dissipated when we dropped below the clouds and the deep green Honduran countryside appeared, rolling around a snaking brown river.

A few moments later we were on the ground, standing in line to clear Honduran immigration. The line moved slowly, and, though the wait seemed interminable, we got through smoothly.

Waiting for us outside was a member of the Fashes' project with the project truck, a small blue pickup with an extended cab. We loaded all our gear in the bed, covered it with a blue tarp and tied it against the wind. We piled in, two in front, three in back.

The drive to Copán Ruinas, the modern city near the ruins, took about three hours. Careening along Honduran roads, the traffic rules became apparent: Drive as fast as possible until you're about to hit something, like the two pigs who narrowly missed becoming someone's dinner when they sauntered across the road as we pulled out of a blind turn.

The Honduran countryside is beautiful. Though dry in spots - we sighted numerous wildfires whose smoke gave the valley a hazy look - the countryside we wound through was a lush green and nestled in beautiful mountains.

We eventually reached the eastern limit of the Copán Valley and pulled off the main paved road onto a small dirt side street, where we got out of the truck. We climbed through some barbed wire, erected by the Honduran government, and walked a hundred feet or so to a creamy-brown stone monument, perhaps 10 feet tall. Though I had read about them, it was the first time I'd seen a stela, the stone monuments carved with ancient Mayan script and images left by the ancient Maya.

This monument, erected in 652 A.D., stood on a steep hill at the valley's mouth, overlooking the Copán River. Bill said it was one of six scattered around the valley and may mark the grand entrance as the first monument travelers would have seen as they entered ancient Copán. The stela's site provided a clear view down the valley, but an interposing hill cut off the view of the ancient city center.

Straight across the valley, however, stands an unexplored site that Bill said may have been built to provide visitors with a dramatic scene from the stela site. A dig there is expected to begin this week. We hope to visit it on our way back from Chiapas and Yaxchilan, when we stop again in Copán before heading to San Pedro Sula and back to Boston.