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Dan Buettner
interviewed by Anthony Qaiyum on October 13, 1995
"The greatest discoveries of my archeology ... have been made by amateurs."
Dan Buettner developed Mayaquest, an effort to incorporate non-traditional participants in an archaeological expedition.
Tripod: The goal of Mayaquest was to explore and uncover clues about the collapse of the ancient Mayan Civilization. Can you explain, briefly, the model you used?
DB: Well, the idea was to let the on-line audience actually direct an expedition, which was a dramatic shift from the paradigm of a bunch of white men going to an exotic part of the world and coming back and reporting on it. Every Monday, the on-line audience voted to send us to one of four sites, which was manned, or womanned, by some archeologist who was studying a different aspect of this collapse. Then, once we [biked] there, the on-line audience could interact with the archeologists. The archeologists would then pose a question pivotal to their research, thus harnessing the intuition of the on-line audience. The greatest discoveries of my archeology, in the past 30 years, have been made by amateurs. What better way to corral amateurs with intuition and expertise than by doing so on the Net.
Tripod: "Uncovering clues," sounds like a great way to get people interested, but I didn't know if that was for real. Can you give me an example of something you uncovered based on that model?
DB: We couldn't actually dig. What we did is align ourselves with the world's top archeologists, and convinced them to hold their big discoveries until we got there. And probably the best example of that is a place called Caracol, which is in southern Belize. We were there when the archeologist, Dr. Arlen Chase, brushed the dirt off a glyph, that, in many respects, rewrites Mayan history. Now typically that discovery would have worked its way through academic channels; maybe taken a year. I should say that, immediately there were two different decipherments of this glyph. There were two archeologists there, and they had opposing decipherments. There was nothing definitive. But we had a image of this glyph and the two decipherments on the Net, within 24 hours of it coming out of the dirt. And ... the big newsgroup absolutely lit up, because all of the sudden there were all sorts of amateur archeologists, who don't have the wherewithal to go to Central America, contributing their interpretation to this discovery. It also provided a springboard for the archeologist to try his theories out before he had to submit them in an academic paper and put his career on the line.
Tripod: How popular was the program?
DB: Net Magazine gave it an A+. Experts speaking on National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" called it the best distance-learning program in the country. It had 1.4 million hits. Prime Time Live, on ABC, thought it was important to come down and spend five days in the jungle with us.
Tripod: Can you give me an idea of the age range of the participants?
DB: Sixty percent, or so, of our audience, we figured, were kids and educators. The other 40 percent were just on-line adventurers who wanted to take part in a mystery without going there. We had one guy who we were in contact with, who just had open heart surgery, and was going to die, and his only connection with the outside world was Mayaquest.
Tripod: Wow. Was it strange to take the direction of your whole adventure from on-line voters?
DB: There were several times that the on-line audience sent us to places we never thought they'd send us. We tried to write the ballets as prosaically as possible. Some just seemed naturally cooler than others. We were surprised many times to be sent to what we thought would be kind of a boring place.
The on-line audience directs us, but they didn't have the option to tell us to bike off a cliff, or bike home, or something like that. It was a controlled direction.
Tripod: So would you say the focus was more on the educational aspect or the archeological aspect?
DB: I'd say it was split equally. Linda Schelee, who is arguably the world's greatest Mayanist, said, in an interview we did with her, that Mayaquest did more to bring people to Maya archeology than archeologists had done in the last 100 years. So, did we come up with any earth shattering conclusions? No. But, did we bring a lot of people to the field? Yes. Did we come up with a new discovery apparatus? I would argue yes. Did we come up with a pretty powerful way to deliver educational content? I would say yes to that, too.
Tripod: Can you tell me more about how you interacted with participants, while you were on the road?
DB: We carried a $33,000 Rockwell exec. set ... and from our laptops would go through a secure telephone and then that would beam up a signal 22,000 miles to a geo-synchronous satellite over Ecuador. Then, that signal would be bounced down to Connecticut where it would be put on-line.
Tripod: Were you the pioneers in using this technology?
DB: Certainly from the back of a bicycle, yes.
Tripod: What gave you the idea for doing this?
DB: The Jason project intrigued me. The idea that one kid, out of the 20,000 that followed the Jason project, could direct a submarine in the Sea of Cortez, from his classroom in Seattle. What we tried to do is figure out how we could put everybody's hands on that mouse. Mayaquest was the result.
Tripod: Do you think there are many opportunities out there for young people, especially involving communications technology?
DB: Yeah, these interactive expeditions are really blossoming -- distance learning programs. I'm in touch with about three or four of them, which are happening simultaneously next spring. We're doing Mayaquest II, but then there are a few other ones happening. I think the value of these things -- because they're real-time, and because they're exciting -- is that they will marshal teachers, who are woefully behind the technology curve, onto the Net for the first time. And that's when content will start pouring in, and the Net will start replacing textbooks.
Tripod: When will Mayaquest II take place?
DB: March.
Interested in giving Mayan archeology a spin? For more information try these places:
Web: http://mayaquest.mecc.com
Email: [email protected]
Or call:
(800)375-0055
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