(Day 22) – Digging In; The Real Work Begins

"We have it," Dr. Rick said, matter of factly, over breakfast. "So," and he smiled wider than I thought possible, "we're going to use it." The permission document he referred to was, indeed, in hand, and you could tell from his face that he'd been waiting for this for a long, long time. It was, poetically, the 22nd - exactly a month before I'm scheduled to leave Peru. After three weeks, the red tape was cut, and my last month was looking like a full-tilt excavation.

"Now," Dr. Rick said, raising his bristly eyebrows and rubbing his hands so they made a dry, rasping sound, "we haven't really reviewed the procedures of an excavation yet... so this morning," and he gestured at the lab, "we'll be running a quick and dirty (and he smiled at his pun) orientation session. Cesar," he waved to Cesar, who nodded, "can take las personas que prefieren el Castellano, and I'll take the English speakers. Okay?," he said, looking around eagerly. Wincing from whiplash, we all nodded.

The lecture was a whirlwind tour of "processual archaeology." Forms, tools, and diagrams were presented and tossed away, incomprehensible in the three-hour lecture. Before you trowel, you... pick? But not unless you've taken pictures... and drawings... and a soil sample. Do remember to lay out your units by theodolite, but never take levels without the tape measure. And speaking of levels, you have to measure down to determine how far... up you are... Everything was indeed, confusing -- especially when echoed in Spanish thirty feet away.

That last bit -- the distinction between height and depth, took a little too long to cover. For the better part of an hour, John would boomerang back and re-explain to exasperated faces: "So remember the units will be over 100 meters above our site datum. That means that, even though you record a measurement down into the ground, you are still up from the datum. Complicated? Not really. That still didn't stop us from revisiting that little explanation in a thousand different incarnations. Argh.

*

The afternoon saw a split group. A contingent, largely Peruvian, sallied forth to the field to lay out units for tomorrow's excavation. The more sedentary among us slugged our way to the lab stools for the last afternoon of lithics. As we juggled flakes, we talked about how weird it would be to finally be doing... what we came to do. Upon returning to our rooms, we each conducted a quietly frantic search for tools bought so long ago. Did we have our levels? Our trowels? And what, oh what, would we wear?

Speaking of clothing, I took my post-shower evening to exercise what Bodie would call my "fancies." As I toweled of, I popped in my contacts, and left my glasses tossed on the bed. This led, of course, to some very confused dinner conversation about how alien I looked without them. I exhumed my only pair of jeans and nice long-sleeve shirt for an evening in. I could tell it would be my last chance to wear them. On the morrow, I'd begin the slow but steady process of filling my pockets with the gritty sand of Chavín.

To celebrate, and round out our trilogy, we watched the last Star Wars movie: A New Hope, which, like most of Lucas' old adventures, pales in comparison to... say... anything we've ever seen. Still, it was nice to relax under the heavy folds of my llama (said: YA-ma) blanket and snuggle as Luke lost his hand and such. Under our beds, our backpacks waited patiently, heavy with tools and notes.