Twas a long day of traveling yesterday on our way down to Pereira. Turns out I had my ‘Jens’ confused and the one that I would be flying with was my classmate in Professor Stewart’s ceramics course this past Spring. She’s in the doctorate program at Temple and made for a very enjoyable travel buddy. Our first flight started out with a bit of turbulence before we even left the ground, when an agitated father with five very young and exhausted children started a commotion in my row. To make a long story short, it ended in the flight attendant writing up his misbehavior on the airplane and my row getting complimentary snacks and cocktails. The disturbance could have been easily avoided, but I wasn’t gonna turn down a free drink!
After landing in Ft. Lauderdale we made our way around the terminals and checked in with Avianca airlines, went through security, again, and settled in for our three hour layover. Needless to say Ft. Lauderdale is not a very exciting or comfortable airport to hang out in, but the flight to Bogota more than made up for it. International flights don’t mess around; we were greeted with warm towels, pillows, blankets, cheesy tortellini dinner, flan, drinks, and on and on. And that was not a first class ticket, mind you. Props to Avianca!
Once in Bogota, it was a mad dash through the (very confusingly laid out) airport to find our gate and go through security once again. We ended up going through security a total of 3 times, one for each flight; I was beginning to wonder if I could even get any more ‘secure’ by the time we arrived in Pereira. It began to rain once we landed in Pereira. Tony, Carlos, and Martha met us at the airport and we journeyed to our new temporary field home of Carerra 27, No. 16-39, Apt 402. Car rides in Colombia have been interesting so far....stop signs are really more of a suggestion and autos always have the right-of-way. Our friend Nicolas who is working on a site over in Santa Maria learned that the hard way, but seems to be getting around well enough with help of a cane.
We slept in a bit this morning before heading to the field, although I can’t say I slept much at all between the wave of allergies I got smacked in the face with after landing and the adjustment to my lumpy bed pad. I am very much looking foreward to sleep tonight, however, I need some solid zzz’s. Carlos picked us up and took us for a little ‘tour’ around Pereira around 9. We had checked out the little cafe across the street and gotten some much needed coffee and breakfast pastries.
We drove down in to the heart of downtown Pereira and up in to the mountains to the north, then worked our way back and around to the southern area of town where our site is. Pereira is a fairly built up area and continues to grow and expand; with a population of about 600,000-700,000 peoples. Our site, however is sort of off to itself, though it is located just off the main road. A lot of this area used to be covered in coffee farms and in some areas there are still plantains and other things being grown, but the agriculture has greatly decreased.
A local source of salt water is not far from our site along with the Canto River which runs under the road we take to get from our apartment to the site. The salt water source, we think, is very important to the location of prehistoric peoples here and the enormous amount of ceramic sherd assemblages is also indicative of that. The ceramics, however, are more of a nuisance than anything else at the moment as we are more interested in getting farther down in to the pre-ceramic territory and finding lithics, stone tools or other cultural material that would be indicative of early food processing and/or agriculture. The earliest carbon date we have for the site at this point is 5700 yBp, but Tony thinks and would like to be able to get a solid date even further back.
Due to a lot of previous work done in the area, it would not be surprising if this area of South America was the center point around which much agriculture and domestication spread, but we need to gather more evidence before being able to say so definitively.
Anyhow I’m starting to get a bit tired of writing and am interested in figuring out what the deal is for dinner, so I think I’ll call it a day here with this. Hopefully I will have more adventures to share about such exciting things as grocery shopping for our sad and very sparse apartment here haha.
Ciao.
