Home in Santa Ana

June 27, 2013

It's been raining every day since we got to Santa Ana, which means the road is too bad to get to the site. However, there is plenty of lab work to keep us busy. Washing, cataloguing, and photographing ceramics from previous years. I enjoy getting to work with the ceramics in the lab (I may be alone in the world on my love of ceramics though), especially before we go out and dig, so I have an idea of what to expect. But today, finally! we saw the sun. Hopefully it dried out the road enough that we can get into the field tomorrow! --RK

On the Bus

June 23, 2013

Today we made the trip from La Paz to Santa Ana. We took a plane to Trinidad, I think, and then we were going to take a truck for the 6+ hour ride to Santa Ana. Just before we left though a guy in a bus drove up and said he'd take us. So we took his offer and had probably the most comfortable ride of anyone with the project to date. The bus had a horn that sounded somewhat like an ambulance, and the driver used it to scare  quite a few people, it was pretty hilarious. We arrived in Santa Ana earlier than expected and were greeted by our awesome host family.--RK

Plaza Murillo

 

 June 21, 2013

Today is the winter solstice here in the Southern Hemisphere. We went to try and find an open museum but had no luck as the whole city was pretty much shut down. We came upon this square, filled with pigeons and people. It seems like every day we explore a new part of the city, and every day we find a new place that could be considered a 'center' of town. We found out that this square was in front of the president's house and other important governmental buildings. In the quiet city, this square was bustling with families eating ice cream and feeding pigeons. We also noted the 'rainbow flag' that we saw always flying next to the Bolivian flag. We assumed it was the indigenous flag, and some research confirmed this. It is very interesting to see a country that is so tied to its indigenous heritage (mostly because the president is indigenous and mandated the flags fly together, and that the city be shut down in honor of an Aymara holiday that falls on the solstice).--RK

Into the Woods

We have now excavated shovel tests like this one in two lines, cutting across the forest island from north to south and from east to west. We dig a test every fifteen meters, which is about fifty feet. All of the tests from inside the ring ditch have fragments of ceramics in them, and very few of the tests from outside the ring ditch have ceramics in them, which tells us that people were making and using pottery inside the circle. Sometimes the shovel tests are more than a meter deep, with fragments still coming out in the screen. On the left is Mary Luz Choque, Alex Rivas in the middle, and Juan Pablo Avaroma is on the right. That blue tarpaulin help us put all the soil back in the hole, which is important because we don't want any cows to hurt themselves. --JW

National Museum of Art

[We have a pleasantly large backlog of blog posts to get through, so we will be moving back and forth chronologically for a few days--JW]

June 22, 2013--We went to the National Museum of Art today and I was blown away. From the curation – organized to take the visitor through the history of Bolivia's art from the 16th century, through to modern art, – to the security guards making sure we didn't get too close to the art, to the vinyl lettering on the walls, something which is a big ticket item in the US and I was very surprised to see, this museum is top-notch. As a former intern at a fine arts museum and part of a museum installation crew, I was very impressed with the attention to detail and the scale and skill that went into creating this museum. The pride Bolivia has in its heritage came through here, as with most places in La Paz, and there was a notable emphasis on cultural revival.--RK

Rachael Kangas

I am a second year graduate student at UCF, studying Maya archaeology. I am focusing with my master's thesis on Maya ceramic analysis. I've lived in Florida for nine years now, and re-discovered archaeology as an undergraduate at Rollins College in Winter Park. I have done cultural fieldwork in Guatemala and spent a short season (1 month) in Alabama for historical archaeological fieldwork. I spend my precious free time usually playing soccer with other students or rock climbing. I look forward to this field season working with Dr. Walker and learning about Amazonian and Bolivian archaeology as these subjects are fairly new to me.--RK

Shovel testing

After several days of rain, which made the dirt road impassable, we got to work this past Thursday at Isla San Francisco, a small island of forest just south of Santa Ana del Yacuma. Before we open a larger excavation, we are digging small "shovel tests", which are about 50 centimeters across, and help us determine whether or not people lived at this place in the past. In this picture, Mary Luz Choque, Alex Rivas and Mabel Ramos (left to right) are discussing the shovel test that can just be seen at the bottom center of the picture. This was one of the first tests on Thursday, and it is out in the open savanna just north of the forest. The line of shovel tests continues to the south, through the forest and out to the other side. -JW

Blogging from Bolivia

The blog is going to take a new direction for the next six weeks or so, and post from our fieldwork in Bolivia. With me in the field this season is an excellent crew, and I hope that as a group we will be able to post at least a few times per week, with contributions in both Spanish and English. I'll ask each of our guest bloggers to introduce themselves as they post, but I can tell you that we have two students from the University of Central Florida, Rachael Kangas and Alex Rivas, and two students from the Universidad Mayor de San Andres, Mabel Ramos and Mary Luz Choque. The photo above is from the Hotel El Dorado in La Paz, looking up through the city towards the altiplano and El Alto.