In which I come full circle.

Well, my time in el norte is at an end - I am sitting in the Cruz del Sur station in Chiclayo waiting for the bus to head back to Lima. I busted my hump to get a good amount of data collection done this week - I finally got back to work Monday morning after spending Thursday-Sunday on a mini vacay while waiting for permissions to come through.

As part of my mini vacay, on Friday I decided to visit the site of Tucume. In trying to figure out the best way to get there, I asked the owner of my hotel (a delightful lady in her early 60s) how much a taxi should cost. Here is a rough translation  of her response from the Spanish:

"A taxi? Bah! You are young! Take the bus! A taxi is for old people like me!"

Accordingly, I hopped into a microbus (she was right; it was easy and super cheap) and headed out to Tucume. The bus drops you off on the main road, about 2 km from the site. You can either take a moto or, if the day is especially fine, you can walk. So I walked. The first kilometer or so is through a small town, while the second is entirely through farmland. It was kind of awesome to just be strolling along in the middle of nowhere on a lovely sunny day.

View from the top of Purgatorio - see the little circle? You can stop there on the way up!

The site of Tucume is a huge, spread out complex of huacas - basically mound structures originally built out of adobe blocks that have been eroding away for centuries. The site is argued to be an important center for the Lambayeque (or Sican) culture and was also apparently used by their successors (Chimu, then Inca). There is a tiny (one-room) on site museum at the entrance and then you are free to walk around some of the trails and hike up one of the biggest mounds, Cerro Purgatorio. At the far end of the complex you can see the excavations with the sculptural reliefs (I don't remember making it that far last time, Gabi - you? It's pretty far from the entrance).

Huaca las Balsas

On top of Purgatorio I befriended a Colombian guy and his teenage daughter; they were wearing matching Colombian flag t-shirts. They had already traveled through Ecuador and were headed next to Lima. I don't know if my dad could've gotten me to wear matching t-shirts when I was 16, but if a multi-country vacation was the reward, I suspect I might have been willing to pay such a price. In any case, I took some pictures of them, and then they insisted taking some with me (and for me, as you can see), so I had a bit of a break from my day of self-portraits. I started to feel like I was photo bombing myself, but I figured unrelenting pictures of scenery with no faces in them can get a little old.

One of my new Colombian friends

All in all, I had a great visit to Tucume, and I bought (another) textile to add to my collection from their little gift shop. The weather was fab - a lovely sunny 76 degrees. The problem, however, with such a temperature is that you don't realize precisely how strong the sun is because you're not boiling hot. Consequently (and somewhat comically), my arms and one side of my neck got slightly pink. Why only one side of my neck? Because apparently I had my ponytail slung over the other shoulder for the entire day.

Funerary Mask @ Museo Nacional Sican

Saturday I revisited my old digs at the Museo Nacional Sican. It's somewhat of a production to get there from Lambayeque - a collectivo to Chiclayo, a taxi to the next collectivo station, a collectivo to Ferrenafe, and then a moto to the museum. None of it expensive or lengthy, just not much of a direct route. It was fun to see the museum again; the area around it is built up a bit more now. The museum there is famous for detailing the excavations of two elaborate tombs, one with a figure who was wearing a large golden mask adorned with the figure of a bat.


After running around being touristy, I decided to take a lazy Sunday at the hotel. I sink-washed a few clothes and then read a book out on my deck. As in, cover to cover. Hence, I unintentionally added some more pink to my arms because I didn't think to apply sunscreen until halfway through. Darn this comfortable climate!

Facade in Lambayeque

This week as I mentioned I have finally gotten back to work! Monday I went to USAT (Universidad Catolica Santa Toribio de Mogrovejo), where the material my friend Haagen excavated from the site of Morrope is stored. Gabi and I helped at the excavations at that site back in 2005, but it was still somewhat surreal to open the first box Monday morning and find my own handwriting on the labels. I've always counted that summer field season in Peru as the experience that solidified my desire to go to graduate school; I find it satisfyingly appropriate that I'm revisiting that material as I work now near the end of my graduate career.

The Morrope bones are generally in decent to pretty good shape; I barely managed to make it through the best of the lot in my time there this week. But, Cuzco (and my already booked flight) waits not for Emily, so it's back to Lima I go, where I will accept the hospitality of Alejandra's family before I head out again on Saturday!

All right - just about time to get on the bus. Here's hoping the Hallmark channel Luke Perry western they showed TWICE on the way up here isn't on the playlist for tonight.

In closing, I will wish my hubby a happy anniversary - three years ago today we got hitched! As I mentioned on FB, it's awesome to have a husband who understands that sometimes you need to spend your anniversary measuring dead people in Peru. :p

More Tucume

And even more Tucume

I forgot to mention - I also had dinner with Haagen and Raul (and all of  Haagen's students) on Monday night at one of my fav restaurants - Sorrento, where the empanadas are the size of your head! As tasty as I remember. Yum.

Ah, el norte del Peru

Northern Peru: land of sunshine and intact bones - what's not to love?

After one of the longest bus rides in the world (okay, that’s hyperbolic, it was only 12 and a half hours, but still), I arrived Sunday night in Chiclayo and took an (overpriced) taxi to Lambayeque. I managed to argue the driver down a few soles, but being a gringa with loads of luggage sometimes I just accept the inflation.

My deck

View of the pool from my deck

My hotel in Lambayeque, the Hosteria San Roque, seemed a little barren in the dark, but viewed during the day it is actually quite charming. It’s an old colonial-style building with lots of open courtyards  filled with flowering plants and vines winding around trellises, with wooden staircases leading up to each set of rooms – very picturesque. My room is pretty bare bones – no television, etc, and wifi only in the main courtyard – but it’s clean and comfortable, and I have my own deck that overlooks the pool (which would be really inviting if it wasn't winter here). 

Monday was probably the most random day I have ever had in terms of data collection - not just in terms of this trip, but in terms of the last seven years of my academic career. I arrived at the Museo Bruning bright and early Monday morning to meet with the director of the museum.  After exchanging pleasantries and talking briefly about what material I would like to study, he tells me some of the material is stored nearby in a place where Pedro (a museum employee) lives. He sends me off with Lucio, who is going to drive me to this place. Because it wouldn't be an authentic fieldwork experience without a jeep that breaks down at regular intervals, I'm happy to report the authenticity of my project because it took four guys giving the jeep a push start for it to work. Anyway, Lucio drives me over to Pedro’s "house," where there are several big warehouse-y type spaces filled with junk, a few rooms at the back where Pedro lives with his family, and a couple of storerooms off to the side with boxes of bones, ceramics, etc from the museum. Initially, I imagined this going something like, “Hm. I have no more space at my museum for all of this newly excavated material. I’m going to keep it in my employee Pedro’s garage.” I learned later from Haagen that this place was actually the initial Bruning museum back in the day because it was old man Bruning’s house – let’s just say it’s gone downhill since then.

Anyway, Pedro ushers me to one of the back storage rooms and starts dragging down the large boxes with the material from the site of Cerros Cerrillos. He helps me improvise a desk using some of the skeletal boxes and a large piece of wood. And, in a pinch, the microscribe case makes a good chair (makes me sorry I ever doubted using this particular case!). Pedro was super helpful, even managing to produce an incredibly long extension cord at one point when my computer was about to die. Which was good, because originally I thought I was going to have to recharge it in his kitchen... He also apparently found what I was doing super interesting, because every once in a while he (and his wife, and then his daughters when they got home from school) would just pop in and stare at me while I worked. Kind of strange to have an audience for data collection.

After I was done for the day and waiting for Lucio to return to pick me up (in the same hard-to-start jeep; hence it was a bit of a wait), I was somehow conscripted into helping Pedro's daughter Ali with her reading homework. Turns out kids learning how to read sounds pretty similar in any language. Anyway, Ali (short for some much longer name I didn't catch) decided I was pretty awesome after I bought her a candy bar for helping me find the bodega when I needed some water earlier that afternoon, so when Pedro told her to work on her homework, which was a reading comprehension lesson (about some guy who lives near Madrid and has a dog and herds sheep, as far as I could tell), I was co-opted into helping - she read it out loud to me, and then I read it back to her and asked her the questions she was supposed to answer. I might not be able to do much in Spanish, but I can read!

Tuesday, I returned to Museo Bruning and, having finished with the collection in Pedro's garage, this time was put in a truck (no push start required) with several people going out to Chotuna, a nearby site with a small museum where a number of collections are stored (and a proper lab space where I could work - no need for microscribe case chairs there!).

Burials from Huaca de los Sacrificios

After the director and several of the workers very helpfully dragged out all 33 skeletons from the site of Huaca de los Sacrificios (it looked like a mass disaster site with all those long wooden boxes laid out), I settled down to work with some of the best-preserved bones I have ever seen. They are BEAUTIFUL. I mean, we’re talking an archaeological sample that is in better shape than most modern collections. Sadly for me, the vast majority of the burials were subadults. If I had 33 adults in this kind of preservation I’d be practically done with my lowland Peruvian sample. So it goes.  

After my afternoon snack, I hiked up one of the smaller huacas for a nice panoramic view of the site.

Huaca Chotuna

Yesterday I returned to Chotuna to work with material from two other sites, La Pava and Jotoro. While nowhere near as beautiful as Huaca de los Sacrificios, I still managed to get partial data sets for a few individuals. After I finished working for the day, I visited the small site museum there, and nearby they have local women employed as weavers as part of a program by the archaeological community.

Not the clearest or most flattering pic, but here
I am in front of Museo Tumbas Reales

Having exhausted all of the skeletal material the Museo Bruning has to offer, today I'm working on getting access to some other material, updating this blog, and playing tourist for a bit. This morning after thanking the director of the museum for all of his help, I toured Bruning itself. It's not very big, but they do house some very nice material, including all of the gold and silver objects recovered from the tomb of the priestess excavated from the Chotuna-Chornancamp area where I have been working. This afternoon I (re)visited the Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipan - I went with Haagen and Gabi back in the day. I wish I had the picture of me and Gabers to put alongside this one. There were only a few other visitors at the museum when I went, and I was invited to join a couple who was paying one of the guides to show them the museum (in Spanish). I actually understood a fair amount (probably because I had been there before) and even managed to ask a few questions. The museum houses the extraordinary remains of the tomb of the Lord of Sipan, sometimes referred to as the King Tut of Peru.

I've also posted below an (illicit) picture taken in the Catacumbas at the Monastery of San Francisco in Lima where I went with Alejandra on Saturday before traveling al norte. If I only I could drag the microscribe down there!  The visit to the catacombs was part of an afternoon where Alejandra and her parents showed me around El Centro, the old historic district of Lima. Earlier that morning I went for a run along Maracon, a road that runs basically right along the coastline in MiraFlores.

Catacumbas, Monastery of San Francisco, Lima

And that, as they say, is that. At least for now. The next few days are somewhat up in the air as I wait for permissions; without any bones to measure on the horizon I think tomorrow I will revisit the awesome site of Tucume.  

Ciao!

Best laid plans and all that

In which our heroine faces a hurdle...

Well, friends, the dissertation game is always throwing you curveballs. I'm sure that's some kind of mixed metaphor, but it describes the week I've had.

On Monday I trotted off to PUCP (Catolica University) to start my work with the archaeological material excavated from Huaca 20. As I learned today, the site of Huaca 20 is in the university complex itself, literally about a hundred feet away from the gabineta where the bones are stored; I knew it was close but not THAT close - I just never saw it because there's a big greenhouse blocking it.

But I digress.  After meeting some of Alejandra's old friends and colleagues when I first get to Catolica, one of them, Carlos, starts off with the slightly alarming sentence, "You know the bones are not in very good shape, yes?"

Uhhh...NOT what I was told. But, I was still pretty positive at this point. Some of the collections I've worked with have been slightly fragmented but complete enough that I could get what I need, and I figured maybe the bones from Huaca 20 would be in a similar state of preservation.

Oh, how wrong I was. How very, very wrong.

I started going through the boxes of bones and became more and more discouraged as the day went on because the majority of this collection is crappy little bone bits. Crappy little bone bits encrusted with dirt. A LOT of dirt.  And even when I had larger bone bits, the skeletons were still very incomplete.  Trust me, an entire pelvis should not be able to fit into a sandwich-sized bag.

So there I am, day one of data collection for my multi-grant funded project with absolutely nada. It was not a good feeling.

But never fear! I rallied, sent off a rash of emails, had a few Skype chats, and now have (amazingly quickly procured, espesh for Peru!) permissions to access material at el museo Bruning in northern Peru. Special thanks go out to Haagen, who helped me work this last minute magic. Soooo...I have completely rearranged the next couple of weeks and now will spend all day Sunday on a bus traveling up to Chiclayo. Here's to being adaptable!

I did manage to collect some data from Catolica this week, but it's very piecemeal and I'm afraid won't be useful. I kept hoping I would find better preserved individuals, but that never happened. The really depressing part is that Julio, one of the archaeologists there, was showing me pictures from the excavations at Huaca 20 - and a lot of the bones are in a pretty decent state of preservation. Which means that the lion's share of the blame goes to the curation policies. It's just really sad.

Other highlights from this week include learning to navigate Lima's bus system. Although calling it a "system" implies some level of organization, of which there is none. But I only got charged the gringa price once, so I feel pretty good about that. And, man, those buses are made for people about a foot shorter than I am. No leg space! My commute to Catolica in Lima traffic was about an hour each way. Being used to NY commuting, though, this didn't really bother me, and it's actually an interesting way to see different parts of the city.

The best moment of the week (apart from getting museum permissions from Bruning!) was meeting Alejandra and her sister for pisco sours and tequenos at Larcomar last night. Totes delish. Today after lunch (I finally had lomo saltado - it's been so long!), Alejandra took me to Museo Arqueologico Rafael Larco Herrera, a privately owned museum dedicated to pre-Columbian art. Her friend Isabelle (who works there) let us in for free and graciously took the time to show us around and explain many of the pieces. And Gabers - if you think the two shelves of naughty pottery at Bruning were good, this place had a whole Sala Erotica. The pot adorned with copulating cuy (guinea pigs) was pretty amusing.

And on that plebian note, I will adjourn for some much-needed sleep. Tomorrow I'm off to explore el Centro Historical while I have some free time in Lima.

Dulces suenos, amigos!

Hola de Lima!

First things first: I have arrived safely with all of my worldly goods to Peru! And I'm honestly not kidding about the "all of my worldly goods" part - my taxi driver in Lima asked me if I had "toda Nueva York" in my bag after he picked it up. (I never purported to be a light packer. And I think I did fairly well, considering how much of my luggage is related to data collection. So there! Truth be told, though, I barely snuck my rucksack in under the weight limit - 48 pounds, baby! Add another 35 lbs or so for the microscribe plus my backpack, and I have about 100 lbs of luggage in all...)

Yesterday was an incredibly long day of travel, but rather (thankfully) uneventful for all that. Most of the notable moments occurred during my layover in Mexico City, such as 1) trying to describe in my halting Spanish the purpose of the microscribe to a Mexican customs official (un instrumento cientifico para recoger los datos en tres dimensionales?) and 2) forgetting I had water in my bottle from the first flight as I went through security for the second flight and thus having to chug half a liter while two Mexican security guards cheered me on because there was no place to dump it. Good times. At least I stayed hydrated, right?  The day ended with my late night arrival in Lima, where I took a taxi with the aforementioned driver to the home of my hosts, Fanny and Enrico. Props to AirBnB because they are a super friendly and helpful couple. Evinced by the fact that they gave me some nail polish remover to help take off the black paint I got all over my fingers by touching the recently painted front gate of their apartment complex. Turns out everyone thought it was dry. Well, folks, it wasn't. Maybe a sign next time. En serio. Anyway, that's the kind of first impression I make - arriving with 100 lbs of luggage and sticky black fingerprints.

Larcomar

After sleeping for many wonderful hours (given that my taxi for JFK came at 6am yesterday morning and that I have zero luck sleeping on planes, I was a touch glassy-eyed last night, which also probably contributed to the paint incident), I woke up today, organized all my belongings, and went out to explore the area where I'm staying. Fanny and Enrico live in the trendy Mira Flores district, only a couple of blocks away from Larcomar - an open-aired mall right on the edge of the ocean (I wasn't kidding about the haze, was I?). After having chifa for lunch (the Peruvian version of Chinese food), I went grocery shopping to pick up some provisions for the week. I also bought a cheap cell phone to use within Peru and had another linguistic adventure trying to buy minutes for it at the supermarket. You see, my main problem is that I can handle the first few conversational phrases in Spanish quite well and so people think I'm more fluent than I actually am, and thus things quickly go downhill when they start firing at me in rapid Spanish and I'm struggling to pick one word out of 20. Nonetheless, I manage to muddle through and everyone is pretty patient and helpful.

I made aji de gallina!

For dinner tonight, I made myself some aji de gallina (well, sort of; notice the help of the pre-made sauce in the pic). It actually wasn't too bad, even if I was too lazy to hard boil an egg for the traditional garnish. A video chat with the hubby and prepping for the start of data collection have rounded out my evening, and after I finish up this post and try to figure out how to add some photos I'm going to relax because tomorrow will be a long day working with the bones! Huzzah for los datos!

Buenos noches, amigos!

And so it begins!

Welcome!

 I've decided to document my dissertation data collection journey, and thus begins the blog of the Wandering Osteologist. You can in part thank (blame?) my friend Luca, who implied I tend to be somewhat lax as a correspondent (okay, okay, "terrible at keeping in contact"), and thus my aim is to update this blog semi-regularly so that a) my mom knows I'm still alive, b) my family and friends get a glimpse of what I'm doing (it still won't make any sense) while they play 'Where in the world is Emily today?', and c) I can share my fantastic travel adventures with anyone who cares to read about 'em! (Yep, I already know they're going to be fantastic. Boom.)

So, in T minus 30 hours, I'll be setting off for an eight month adventure spanning four continents. Needless to say, my current mood is something along the lines of "GAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" This state of affairs actually has more to do with getting everything settled here in NYC before I leave than it does with the journey itself because, friends, if perchance you are unaware, this lady looooves to travel. I'm sad to leave my hubby (and kitties) behind but super excited to hit the road, collect some data, and bang out this dissertation at last!

Item numero uno on my itinerary is Peru. Back in 2005 I spent an awesome three months working as part of an archaeological team excavating the first colonial-era chapel in northern Peru and living in quarters at the Museo Nacional Sican (and developing an abiding love of pisco sours). Northern Peru is far less well-traveled than the touristy south, and I had the opportunity to visit little known but fabulous sites such as Tucume and Chan Chan. This time around I'm excited to hit some of the more traditional highlights such as Machu Picchu, which will be fairly easy for me because I will be working for a month in the nearby city of Cuzco. The first stop, however, is three weeks in the capital city of Lima, where I will be working at Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP), the alma mater of my friend and colleague Alejandra (who deserves and has earned my unending gratitude for helping me navigate the complex governmental and professional requirements for studying human remains in Peru). Having not been super impressed with Lima in the past (hazy, overcast, grimy, etc), I was somewhat resigned to the prospect of spending several weeks there, but Alejandra (a native Limena) assures me it's now "much less crappy" than it was a decade ago, so I'm willing to give it a second chance and explore a bit on the weekends with the aid of my Frommer's Day by Day guidebook. First, though, I actually need to *get* there, so I'm going to sign off and get back to the pre-travel frenzy of laundry, organizing, and packing!

Buenos noches, amigos!