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!