Sunday, October 01, 2006

I was woken up early this morning by two loud blasts from a car horn somewhere nearby. After the first one, I tried to go back to sleep, but the second one sealed my fate. I was awake.

We're going to Sicalpa today to visit the market and see the sites from which all these artifacts we have came from. I'm pretty excited about that. But first, coffee.

***

Sicalpa was awesome. There were sheep on top of buses, indigenous people selling indigenous foods and goods, and colours, colours everywhere. It was loud, crowded, smelly and completely overstimulating. I loved it.

We went by truck to Colta Lake and up to Sicalpa Viejo (Old Sicalpa), met friends of Ross' and visited sites he's dug in the area. We used an old colonial map to find possible locations of long buried churches and tile factories and began to make ossible connections on the Inca road which passed through the town. We're going to walk a portion of it on Wednesday and seek out another part another day. As much as I'm interested in colonial stuff, it's the Inca and pre-Inca things that really excite me. Tomorrow we start the analysis of artifacts. It should involve a fair bit of intently staring at old, dirty, broken things and figuring out what/when exactly they are. I'm going to bed now. I'm really tired.

***

I knew there was something I was forgetting. We got to be full-on map nerds when we got back to the house. Ross pulled out a bunch of topographic maps, laid them out on the floor and we basically crawled all over them trying to figure out the most likely route of the Inca road. It was great. Next, we go travelling to test our theories.

No comments: