August 14, 2009

August 14, 2009

Today, we “got the day off” from working at the INC. Instead, Me, Adriana, and Megan accompanied Tofa and Melissa to Chokepukio – the site of the burials that we’re analyzing in the house-lab. They basically devoted half their day to walking us around the site! Take about two awesome women.
Melissa and Tofa are ceramic experts that are sharing lab space with us at the lab-house. They’re colleagues of Valerie. Tofa, I found out, is an author, who has her first book coming out in October! How exciting! We had a fun chat in the car to Chokepukio about the Writing-World. Melissa was one of the lead excavators at this site, and the site had been excavated for the past 10 years.
It was about a 35min car ride – we rode in an old VW van, driven my our resident “chauffeur” Froy – to the site. It was amazing to be able to actually walk around the site the burials we’re analyzing are from. What’s more, we essentially got a private tour of the ruins from one of the excavators WITHOUT all the tourists! It was just us 5 out there. Melissa took us through all the rooms/units, explained everything, & showed us where the burials had been found…and an area where the found the remains of several sacrificed children!! It was determined that they were child sacrifices based on the fact that all interred children were of the same age & buried at the same time. I guess it’s possible that there was a plague/disease that struck the area, but the fact that several children of exactly the same age were buried communally, makes that hypothesis less plausible. She was such a wonderful tour guide.
One of the characteristics of this site were all the burial niches in the ruin walls. Some were high up, well above my head! We each took turns getting our pictures taking in one of the burial niches, crouched like the mummies that were found in them. I will say the niches weren’t that large, so I, being 5’11’’, did NOT fit comfortably into it. Lol.
Being at the burial sites of these individuals sort of “humanized” them more. As bad as it sounds, it’s easy to ignore that the bones we analyze belonged to people who walked the earth 500 years previously. It does much for shaping your perspective on ethics when dealing human remains, and served as a strong reminder for me that these are people, not disassociated skeletons, and should continue to be treated with respect. They were also interred with – most likely – some ceremonial rites. They were loved and their deaths were something the Inca did not take lightly. Sometimes I wonder if some Inca were alive now, and knew that their ancestors had been removed from their place of rest, if they’d be upset….
Anyway, it was an excellent day filled with excellent sights & information. What better way to explore ruins than with the excavators themselves.