phillyb doing archaeology and poo in peru: a running photo blog for teh huddle

[R0CKnR0LLA]

good stuff phillyb

 

 

just watch out for giant boulders, pits full of snakes and so forth

[Kurb]

but...dem tittahys

[Jangler]

Good stuff....but what about the boobies?

[Ja Rhule]

Yea, stay on topic lads. Titties mue importante

[Cat]

Very interested in the educational part of this thread, not the titties part. I'd love for it to stay on topic.  :) Thanks boys

[PhillyB]

no titties. she is worth more than the sum of her parts :) they are just like any other big titties you can find in the lovely ladies forum. 

[PhillyB]

also: mummies fuging stink.

[Squirrel]

Give it a sponge bath then.

[PhillyB]

ok so today we took a break from the lab work and trekked out into the northern outskirts of the atacama desert, the world's driest, in search of a prospective site that had been supposed to have exhibited terracework, foundation and wall remains, and other such standards of archaeological features. the main goal, aside from locating the site, was to locate potsherds (the technical term for broken pottery shards) on the surface of the site to determine that it wasn't just an archaic pre-ceramic site (it still would've been cool, but not of interest to the empire/period we're studying, which was middle horizon (think about 600-1000 CE).

 

we drove out to the site, which, as i noted, is desolate as hell, and looks like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

it was a shitload of work. i ended up mapping the site once we found it (after hours of bouncing through endless desertscapes in a rattletrap of a 4x4 pickup) with a handheld GPS and spent an inordinate amount of time slogging up sandy dunes around the perimeter of the entire site, stopping every couple meters to log a waypoint into the interface to record the position. so most of my day looked like this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

during the survey itself i located a large piece of pottery, one of the four we discovered, that provide solid evidence that it's a culture contemporary with ceramic use (and therefore with the empire we're studying) and gives merit to potential excavations there in the future. i photographed the potsherd in situ (a fancy archaeological term meaning in the context in which it was found; this generally applies during actual excavations when things are in their primary contexts, in houses, or storerooms, or trash pits, etc.) and we catalogued the profile and size.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

i also came across (on a neighboring site several ridges over) this stone pathway, or what remains of it, leading to a ceremonial site. it was pretty nifty.

 

 

 

 

 

[YoungPanthers89]

I played that map on battlefield a ton.

[Bronn]

I am now even more convinced that the Mars rover images are fake as poo.

[Hawk]

was just thinking the same thing

 

 

rename thread title to, Holy poo, I won a trip to Mars

[PhillyB]

I am now even more convinced that the Mars rover images are fake as poo.

 

it's pretty wild. almost eerie, walking out there alone, with the wind absolutely howling and kicking up dust, surrounded by the mute remains of this ancient civilization, buildings just scattered down the desert dunes like they exploded, giant-ass boulders dropped in the middle of the sand like some god just threw them there

 

it's other-worldly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Hawk]

can you blame them for leaving?