short n' sweet

Today we had to leave work after lunch once again due to the massive amounts of rain. I think today was the hardest, most intense rain I’ve experienced since being here. Carlos says that this much rain is really unusual for July which tends to be much more calm than June, but so far I think it has rained more during this month of my time here than June. I was literally out in the rain, shoveling out trenches on three different sites of the excavation to keep the water from pouring over the walls of our unit. I was wearing my rain jacket, but I was more or less soaked by the end of it; Diego was helping bail out buckets of water from the trenches to keep them from over flooding as it was. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew was sitting pretty under the break tarp sipping coffee and observing us go to town; they must have thought I was crazy to be out in that rain....guess I’m a little overprotective when it comes to my excavations. I couldn’t help thinking about how Tony had reprimanded me for digging the first small trench along the southern edge of the unit because, as he reminded me, these were archaeological sites....mind you, the ‘trench’ was no more than 6 inches down and all of that layer is just crummy pottery that is not important to our project so I went for it haha! What Tony doesn’t know won’t kill him ; ) Have to say it worked quite well.

It worries me a little though, the rain, for my departing flight next Wednesday because I am on the 7:00 flight out of Pereira which usually comes from Bogota or Cartagena earlier in the morning, meaning it doesn’t sleep the night before in Pereira and is more likely to experience delays or issues flying in to Pereira in the morning if the weather is bad. That, and Tony sent me an email with instructions for the transfer in Bogota that were a little nerve racking since the airport there is both under construction and difficult to navigate in the first place, however, I am hoping for the best! What else can I do? 

side note: I am trying to get this as up-to-date as possible, a few more posts are on there way I promise...longer and more exciting posts. Stay tuned!!

I clean dirt for a living?

Today we arrived at the site to find massive amounts of water held in the bamboo, string, and tarp structure that covers our unit as well as quite a bit of mud on the floors and walls of the excavation from the runoff of the massive rain the night before. I think that rain, second only to looters, is an archaeologists worst enemy, although I guess that burrowing animals, insects and plant roots need to be included in there somewhere as well. The rain has been extremely frustrating though, because you do all this work the day before excavating and cleaning the floors for pictures and then the rain just cancels out all that effort. And yes, I clean dirt for a living. I think about the absurdity of this often while working, but what can I say, I love it!

So anyway, Ricardo has been with us for a few days here in Pereira, he is a geologist from Manizales that works in the volcanic and seismic activity observatory there. Martha and Carlos had him visit to interpret the soils at our site and others in the area like Cuba, etc. It is interesting having him in the field to explain what he thinks about the different patterns in the soil profiles of the excavations since it is his specialty. Also, because we are really getting down to the end of the large excavation, I decided to go ahead and really clean the bottommost unit floor which was excavated in years prior and has accumulated quite a bit of other soil buildup/runoff. This turned out to be a bit more of a difficult task than I had intended because the soil in the lowest part of the excavation is extremely dense and humid, like wet, really compact sand. So that was a bit of a workout in and of itself, but the photographs of the unit with the entire thing cleaned up, walls and all looked really nice and will hopefully be useful for future analysis of the site.

Museo de Arte

Yesterday (these are quite delayed and out-of-date posts....disregard the corresponding post-dates with relation to reality, because they are false! haha) was our day off and I spent the morning sleeping in and catching up on field paperwork. I remembered mid-afternoon that I wanted to check out the modern art museum here so I went online and learned that they were open until 5, grabbed my stuff and walked down toward La Catrorce and behind to the Museo. The security guard was so hospitable and explained to me about the four exhibits currently there and how to navigate the museum. I was the only one there so I think he was happy to have someone to talk to haha, but it was a very interesting experience. It is small, of course, but really neat to see artwork from local Colombians and see their perspective on topics expressed in their work. I enjoyed it very much and was happy I remembered it was nearby. Of course, I took way too many pictures, but I wanted to remember the artwork and took some pictures of the descriptions and artist biographies as well so that I can take more time later to fully understand the spanish ; )