This is all to say that we have done this. The Chavín Crew of antiquity once halted construction in the town of Chavín to dig some 20 meters under the cobblestone streets. In the loamy depths of the town’s history, they uncovered thousands upon thousands of stone chips, once used for scraping, cutting, hunting, and, we can imagine, shaving.
This trove of… gravel… got passed down from venerable ziplock to venerable ziplock, until it landed, with a gritty crunch, on our lab’s table. The task of the heroes of the lithics lab is to categorize these lascas (Spanish for “flakes”) in a dozen dimensions. That was all well and good for them, those lab people, and had only a tangential relevance to me. That is, until I joined them.
Truth be told, theodoliting had worn thin. Though the Zen of the Pole was all well and good for a few days, I grew tired of the thorn-scratched legs, rope-burned arms, and achy back. It wasn’t hard work, but change was possible; so, when the entire group began playing Task Musical Chairs, I slotted myself in the mercifully non-outside lab.
It is a pretty sweet deal: while others are trooping about on mounds or crawling in canals, you get to drink tea, eat cookies, listen to music, and put things in bags. No dirt, no exercise, no problems – almost as if you didn’t come to Peru at all!
Lithics work does have it’s downsides, however. As I mentioned before, the lithics team is extensively educated (by a ~30 minute lecture) on analyzing stone flakes in a dozen dimensions. With one of us at your side, you’ll learn things about arrowheads you never dreamed of: their facets, material type, concavity, method of production, tool status, cortical location, orientation, platform location, overall angle to the core, and much, much more. Once a lithics team (read: conversational partners) agree on characteristics, they are input into a centrally managed, statistically evaluated archaeological database. Which, in our case, is Excel.
I mentioned music: the lab owns one of those lacquered white, terribly cheesy iPod docks / speakers / chargers / coffee maker. The crux of every morning, of course, is whose iPod will sit in the thirty-pin throne. Will it be Aimee’s, with her eclectic blend of techno and country? Or will Juliet’s millennial bubblegum out? With my library of ~1500 songs, I considered each and every permutation of the group and made, in the dead of night, the ultimate playlist.
It had to be just four hours long, so no room for mistakes. The energy had to contour to our day, stone-slow to begin, spiced by upbeat hits. It had to play to the two high-schoolers, the eighties-infatuated roommate, and the ever cryptic Aimee. Nothing too depressing, and, perhaps, a few Spanish canciónes for the Peruvian students that floated in and out. With my tailored MorningMix carefully synched to my iPod, I rushed from breakfast to the lab, so that when Tara asked whose iPod stood black and glossy in the dock, I looked up from the table where I was so carefully arranged and said “What? Oh, that’s mine.”
What I didn’t anticipate was the unbearable anxiety. Each time a new song would queue, I would freeze, stone flake in hand, and listen intently for any change in the room. Is that shifting a tapping foot, or is Tara brushing her hair in exasperation? Did Aimee just sigh disgustedly into her tea? Why is Ronaldo laughing!?
I took to pre-emptive strikes. For all sixty-four songs I publicly announced the artist, song, and reason for inclusion. Damn the dissenters; I couldn’t hear them over my explanations.
We sat at the center of the project. Every now and again, people would sweep in and out, demanding to see someone or desperately in need of an indescribable tool. Curators, post-grads, adopted puppies – they bustled by, badgering or helping, always squawking into cell phones or walkie-talkies.
Sometimes we could glimpse the corners of interesting stories: Dr. Rick leaving for the mayor’s office… with a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand; an elderly man being introduced as the designer of every museum in Peru; and a dog that everyone pets absentmindedly, though we couldn’t say where it came from. Enmeshed in it all, we laugh and listen to music over crackers and tea, flipping the gray flakes slowly between our fingers.
There were a few overheard comments from the next table that made us snort into our tea. Tara recounted one of her worst memories: her mother had taken her shopping, and as she bent over to reach for a shelf she said, “shopping is so tiring!” Neither Tara nor her other Palo Alto friend, Juliet, understood why her mother dragged her out of the store, screaming that she’d raised a brat.
At one point, actually, Juliet questioned a judgment call Dr. Rick made; she asked if anyone would believe that a particular flake was meant to be a tool. Exasperated from looking at thousands of pieces of ancient junk (literally), Dr. Rick responded with what Robert later described as his most “pimp” comment:
“Seeing as I’m probably the foremost lithics expert in Peru right now…, I don’t think anyone is going to try and question my judgment.”
Boo-yah-ka-shah.
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