also meant the cancelation of a development project in this poor area of Peru.

We will now be an unreliable university when it comes to joint projects"

It is ironic that a project in Guatemala called La Blanca, led by Cristina Vidal, a professor at Valencia University, received the Best Practices in Site Preservation Award from the prestigious Boston-based Archaeological Institute of America, and yet was denied 32,000 euros by the Spanish government because the Valencian region is over its deficit target.

"The freezing of funds is a blow to a project that, besides researching Maya archeology and underscoring its rich cultural heritage, is also conducting development work in villages around La Blanca," says Vidal.

Digs usually have a "father" and a "mother." The Spanish teams on the ground are often assistedby local institutions. This is the case with a project underway at the Qubbet el-Hawa necropolis in Aswan, where Alejandro Jiménez's team works with the Egyptian government's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Explaining to one's partner about the reasons for a year's suspension of funds cannot be easy.

The Spanish teams working in Italy with regional universities know all about it. "Unfortunately, some expenses had already been effected, since we were confident that the provisional grant would become final shortly, as it had in previous years," explains Darío Bernal, director of a joint project between the universities of Cádiz and Ca'Foscari of Venice involving fishing techniques in Pompeii. "Now we have to take on those expenses through other channels in the middle of a complex economic situation that is smothering