Busy in Pucon

This past week marked our first full work week in the entire project! The trench we are working on now has produced more artifacts than the last two trenches put together. Every day we have been pulling out ceramic after ceramic. In the area we are working in now there are these huge horse flies all over the place. They fly right into your face and buzz really loudly, which is annoying, but then one of them bite me and it was on! My goal before we leave is to kill as many of those flies as I can! I have devised a system in which I knock them to the ground and then stomp them with my boots. One of the guys working for us, Julio, is able to catch them. His fly to death ratio is higher than mine, but I hope to catch up. The flies don’t really bother the workers very much but they were just going after Jake and me. Jake’s advisor from Vandy, Tom, has been in Chile for the past month working on various projects and he came out to the site today and he said that the flies were attracted to our sun screen. He said he just stopped using it because the flies wouldn’t leave him alone when he had it on. Do I not wear sunscreen and get a terrible sun burn, or do I wear it and then get eaten alive by these huge flies? We will just have to see what the future holds but I do not take melanoma lightly.

We had a great visit with Tom. There was a triathlon in Pucon today and all the roads in downtown and leading into downtown were closed off for the race so we weren’t able to get to Church this morning and we had to walk into town to meet Tom. I have never seen Pucon so packed! People were everywhere! Tom and Jake talked about the ceramics that we had been pulling out and looked at a few of the artifacts. He treated us to lunch at our favorite restaurant in town; I enjoyed my Pumpkin ravioli and Jake his three-peppered steak. We then drove out to the site after the roads were reopened. Tom was pleased with the work Jake had done and gave him some advice and then Tom headed back to Temuco.

Not much else to report other than we will never leave home without a supply of ground black pepper. We brought some McCormick black pepper with us this trip and it has already made a world of difference in the food we have been able to cook. The spaghetti, the springtime dinner, the fajitas have all been so much better with it. I also made some vegetable stir fry for dinner one night this past week and it was GOOOOOOOOD!!!!!!! We bought some Kikkoman Soy Sauce and I made some fried rice. I then cooked some carrots, zucchini, onions, green and red peppers, and cashews in the soy sauce with some garlic and peach jam. It was so good we are going to have it for dinner again tonight.

We hope everyone at home is doing well.

Mandy and Jake

Day one

We didn't have access to the internet while we were at home over Christmas break, so I wasn't able to update the blog until now. We had a great Christmas and enjoyed our stay at home, it wasn't long enough.

Being back in the cabin feels like we never left, which is making it strange to be here. Even though we went home and slept in our bed, sat on our couch, cooked in our kitchen; being back feels like we were never there. One major plus to this trip is that we brought our Playstation 2 with us. We brought a couple video games, but we mainly brought it to hook up to the TV and watch TV show DVDs and movies without having to watch them on one of our computers. This time we brought more DVDs then we will probably be able to watch so we won’t run out of any this trip. Granted we won’t have as much time on our hands as last trip, but still better safe than sorry. Also, it seems that Jake and I are not responsible for the unnatural amount of rain this summer, it continued to rain even when we left to come home for Christmas. Hopefully that rain will let us dig more this trip. It was raining Sunday morning but cleared up enough for us to dig on the site yesterday.

If the first day on the dig site is any indication of how this trip will go, then fantastic! Even though we could see our breath when we left the cabin yesterday morning, it warmed up quickly by lunch time. During the first trip Jake was focusing on digging within the fence that surrounds the Santa Silvia site that Gordon worked on in the last 80’s early 90’s. This trip Jake is focusing on the area outside the fence that has never been excavated before. We started digging in two 1 meter by 1 meter squares and there were so many artifacts coming out! We pulled out lithics, pieces of obsidian, roof tiles, and a ton of ceramics! Nothing was a complete pot or plate or anything like that, but we pulled out between 65 and 80 pieces yesterday alone! We found more in the first day than we did in the first month last trip! Since everything is broken and there are rocks that were used to create tools and weapons in this location, Jake thinks that maybe we have found were the population would dump their trash. We were down to 30 cm by the time we left yesterday and there is no way that erosion would be able to move that much, that deep, and that far away from the original site. We will see what today will bring!
Hope all is well at home!

Mandy & Jake