Travels with Batman: Teotihuacan, 1961
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Travels With Batman: Teotihuacan, 1961 by Richard A. Diehl Originally publishd in Arqueología Mesoamericana: Homenaje a William T. Sanders, Vol 1, edited by Alba Guadalupe Mastache, Jeffrey R. Parsons, Robert S. Santley, and Mari Carmen Serra Puche. Pages 41-56, Intsituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico, 1996. Author’s note to the on-line version: The manuscript for this essay was originally written in 1986. The on-line version includes illustrations that were not in the published paper. RAD May 29, 2007 Introduction How does one honor his former professor and close friend when writing an essay for a Festschrift? After pondering this question for a long time, I narrowed the choices down to two possible approaches. The first was to write a scholarly article on a reseach topic I have pursued since leaving Bill's academic nest in the late 1960's. Ideally this article would contain a significant advance in Mesoamerican archaeology and would allow Bill to bask in the reflected glory of his former student. Alternatively, I can write a more personal essay dealing with reminiscences of times and situations that involved the two of us. I decided to follow the second approach out of both necessity and desire. Necessity because I started at least six scholarly papers but was not satisfied with any of them. If I wrote a scholarly paper I would want it to one of my best and frankly none of these showed that kind of promise. Sometime in the future I will write a paper which pleases me so much that I will say " Hey kid, this is it! This is the paper you want to dedicate to Bill." Then I will dedicate it to him. The desire portion of my decision to write what follows stems from the fact that Bill has been urging me to do something along these lines for years. William Lyman Molyneaux, 1961 (source: La View 62: The Book of the Senior Class, Vol 72, The Pennsylvania State University) Whenever Bill, Jeff Parsons, and other veterans of the 1961 Teotihuacan Valley Project field season at professional meetings or other gatherings, the conversation invariably gets around to William "Batman' Molyneaux and a series of "Do you remember when?" stories. Batman and I both participated in Bill's 1961 undergraduate archaeological field school at Teotihuacan. Unlike me, however, he chose not to continue on in archaeology; after earning his BA in psychology he became a career officer in the United States Air Force. Most field projects of any size has A CHARACTER amongst the crew but none I am aware of have had one of Batman's stature. That's why he crops up so often whenever we have a few beers under our belts. On at least three occasions Bill has said, " Somebody should write up the story of the Batman and the 1961 season." or something to the effect. I am probably better qualified than anyone else because I rode to Mexico and back with him in his car, the Batmobile, so here it is. I should explain at the outset that his nickname reflected his interest in bats as experimental animals in psychology as well as his love of exploring caves. It may also have something to do with the fact before I knew him he turned several bats loose in the Penn State Student Union movie theater during a Dracula film. I know that everybody "knows someone" who did such a thing but anyone who doubts this particular story can check it with Michael West, a fellow field crew member in 1961 who is now a specialist in Andean archaeology. Mike was employed in the student union at the time and spent weeks trying to rid the cafeteria of its flying mammals. It is also important to clarify which Batman I am talking about. Our Batman was not the anthropology student of the same nickname who reportedly drove around Merida in a Thunderbird convertible wearing a Batman costume ( E. Kurjack, personal communication). Our Batman had a low opinion of flashy cars and people who wear capes. While the Teotihuacan Batman stories have acquired many embellishments over the years, I have made a sincere effort to stick to the facts as I actually remember them. I will resolutely ignore incidents that really should have happened because they sound so good but are probably later additions to the tale. Unfortunately I have never kept a diary so I can't check back on an impartial source but what follows is as close to the truth as I can make it. The Prelude The background to my decision to become an anthropologist is tangentially related to the Saga of the Batman and since both Bill Sanders and Batman figure into it, the story is worth relating at this point. At least it explains why I was standing in the rain at the Valley Forge exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike waiting for Batman at the real beginning of the story. Like many college freshmen, I had no clear ideas about my future when I arrived on the Penn State campus in September 1958 ( yes, this took place so long ago that classes actually started AFTER Labor Day rather than before it). History had always interested me and was one of the few majors that did not require any mathematics or hard sciences, so I became a history major. Actually I enjoyed my history courses tremendously and I still read history books for pleasure. I did fairly well as a college student, at least I made it through to my junior year without flunking out of school. There were some close calls though; for example, my D's in Spanish. While they did not look very good on my transcript, I knew they had been gifts from kindly professors who did not want me to repeat the courses, or at least their sections of them. I was very thankful that I would never have to bother with that language after college. Little did I know that in a few years Spanish would be an essential part of my life! The real killer, however, was my F in Army ROTC. In those days Penn State operated on the obviously ( to me, at least) fallacious theory that Land Grant universities had to require two years of ROTC of all male students. Although the course only counted one credit hour, my fourth semester F lowered my grade point average enough to place me on probation going into my junior year. One hardbitten old Seargent who probably preferred the battlefield to the campus parade ground told me that I was the the first person to flunk Army ROTC at Penn State in twenty years. I believed him. My spotty attendance had something to do with my F but the primary factor was a very low grade on my class project. I had to design a response to a Communist-backed guerilla insurgency in mainland Southeast Asia ( remember this was in the spring of 1960, several years before the Tonkin Gulf incident). My gameplan was to send in hundreds of thousands of troops, including several armored divisions. My instructor said that was the worst possible way to fight a guerilla war and failed me. One can imagine my feelings later when General William Westmoreland got his fifth star for doing precisely what I had proposed. Of course it is only fair to point out that this strategy also lost the war. To add insult to injury, I had to repeat the course as a junior. Obviously my junior year required some careful course selection if I were ever to become a senior. The fall semester was somewhat of a personal triumph. I took a full load of courses, studied hard, stayed out of bars most of the time, and raised my grades in a way that frankly puzzled my advisor. By the beginning of the second semester I had enough self-confidence to challange the entire History department on their own ground. My second semester course selection turned out to be a disaster. I registered for four history courses, Humanities, and ROTC. The disaster consisted of taking three advanced level history courses. History Department policy stated that every advanced level course had to require ten book reports and at least 3000 pages of outside reading. Thus I was faced with 9000 pages of outside readings, in addition to an Introductory level history course, a Humanities course with seven or eight required texts, and one afternoon a week on the parade ground; all in a sixteen week semester. Just to add some ballast to a sinking ship, one of the advanced history courses was Religion and Thought in Medieval Europe and I had not yet taken Introduction to Medieval History! On the first day of class the professor mentioned the Medieval concept of souls damned to perdition and I saw the handwriting on the wall in a very personal way. Fortunately, my sister Beverly came to the rescue. She was a freshman trying her best to have a memorable time while flunking out of college. For reasons she no longer remembers, she signed up for Archaeology 1, taught by one William T. Sanders, and suggested I drop my Advanced Rack and Inquisition course and take archaeology with her instead. Her primary motivation was not to save my skin but rather to have an escort who would take her into the My-Oh-My Lounge, a newly opened bar just across the street from the classroom. At the time she was 17 years old, I was 19, and Pennsylvania's legal drinking age was 21.