My week has gone (this is the short version) something like this:
Monday took my first hike up to the site. takes an hour and a half all up stairs and really steep hills. high altitude, very hard to breathe. But it´s absolutely beautiful. Anyway we get to the site (called Devil´s Balcony), split up in to groups and learn about the site and start excavating. We dig until around 3, then go back down the hill. Monday I ate something not so great, went to bed early and then....
Tuesday I had food poisoning. It sucked, stayed at the hostel with a few other sick roommates and slept and watched movies. Tres boring.
Wednesday I recovered, got to take a taxi halfway up, climbed the rest of the way, excavated from 9 until 3 again, came back down the hill. Went to dinner, took salsa lessons, fell asleep.
Today I walked the whole way again, excavated till 3, again went to dinner and salsa.
Suffice to say I am very tired, but doing well, and definitely getting in shape! Tomorrow we only have a half day of excavating, then lecture. I´m sure more salsa after that.
Our site is fantastic, complete with river and huge rock/cave formations with waterfalls. I´ll go into more detail later, but basically the site is believed to be an Inka sacrificial/ ceremonial site. We are looking to find the canal the Inkas built which would mark the perimiter of the site. So far in our unit we have unearthed the wall and will dig deeper to see if we can find any ceremonial items or anything else that would give us clues about how the Inka used the site. Very interesting stuff, I´m learning a lot about what it´s like to excavate and I´m also getting a lot stronger wielding pick axes and caring buckets of dirt back and forth up and down a hill as we dig deeper.
Anyway, hope everyone´s doing well. Miss you all, talk to you later!
No comments:
Post a Comment