Travel to San Borja (Bountiful)

We decided to try to get to San Borja again, and hit it this time. Perhaps this is a potential site for Bountiful. We found walls, roads, a variety of fruit trees (including olives) as well as pottery shards. Again the vegetation was dense and interesting. A young man who works with INA (something like Instituto Nationale Anthopoligia—he is working on a dig at El Arco; Zach, I think this may be a good connection for us [his bosses at least]) walked us around indicating which things were Jesuit, Dominican, and pre-Jesuit. He maintains that many of the walls and roads were pre-Jesuit. There were cold springs and hot springs that were “cribbed” with rock and which I will attach pictures for with this email. (Kevin, my last email with images bounced back, so I don’t think you got them). I also took some video I can show at our next meeting.

Whether or not this is Bountiful, we certainly came away from what I now consider the most interesting site I have seen so far in the project. I took olive, pomegranate, grass, and bamboo samples for Rickmael. Kent, I think you would have had a heyday with this one! They are growing grapes, lemons, date and blue palms there as well. Lots of mounded earth and rock walls to inspect as well (One image I will include shows a section of wall that came down three weeks ago with an earthquake they had in the area). Water catchment systems that our young INA fellow thought were pre-Jesuit too . . . Zach, I think we need to get you there one way or another.

This is ATV country with super-washboardy roads that go inland 22 miles from the west (Mex #1 hwy-lots of room to park vehicles) or about 20 from the Bahia de los Angeles highway (not so much room to park vehicles). Linda actually found a pottery shard as we were walking and surrendered it to the young man. I’ll include images of those shards too. He had a piece of respaldo that looked like a cutting edge. He also had a large stone jug about 18 inches in height. He had made some others himself from the same kind of stone, but indicated this smaller jug was original to the area.

Anyway, you can see that we got excited about San Borja and think it is a worthwhile place to spend some time. Check out the pictures