Huzzah for Italy!

I don't know if anyone caught the game, but it was magnificent: the French have been playing brutishly all tournament (Zidane's coldly calculated headbutt in the final's second half was hardly the beginning) and finally got what they deserved in an overtime penalty shoot-out.



After a week and a bit on the road around Peru with the Nagrechoid, I arrived in Chavin late Monday night, eight hours by bus from Lima. You can see the town in the lower right of the picture above: the site itself is the bright green patch immediately to the town's left. There isn't much to do here in Chavin (pop. 2500, probably measured on Sundays when Andean villagers descend out of the mountains to sell their wares and produce), so forgive me if football has taken on a renewed glamour for me (anything to make 90 minutes go by!). None of the Stanford kids seem to care very much, so I ended watching the semifinals and finals with some very passionate Peruvians - luckily, I've found that football and beer can be relied upon to dissolve most language barriers. But that's all in the past now: I predict a return to yelling, frenzied gesturing and the occasional pummelling as the main mode of cross-cultural communication.

We began actual work this Tuesday: I'm being inducted, slowly but surely, into the mystical ways of the theodolite, a surveying instrument that I'm certain will be eminently useful in graduate school and life thereafter, let alone the life hereafter. It's pretty cool to be able to determine coordinates of locations to the accuracy of a millimetre, and it sure beats shoveling dirt with the coolies. Not that they haven't made me dig, with only a tiny pick and a trusty trowel for tools: my 2m by 2m unit lies squarely in the demolished kitchen of a former site caretaker, a man clever enough to build his house directly on top of unexcavated archaeological material, mere inches from a temple over 2500 years old. Here, I've discovered such thrilling things as: chicken bones, llama bones, guinea-pig bones, a human molar, green tarp, a beer-bottle shard (I swore up and down that it was obsidian, but nobody believed me), stucco, concrete and bricks from the collapsed wall. Just as we were about to hit a more interesting historical level, I was pulled off the unit to dig a sizeable hole, 1m deep by 1m wide by 2m long, right next to the mosquito-infested river Mosne that runs by the site. We're looking for an underground sewage canal that may or may not lie under where I'm digging. Needless to say, I was thrilled to be able to put my non-neglible brawn, malarial immunity and a SLE-honed nose for excrement to appropriate use. I promise to let you know if I hit Femaleontes on the way down.

Please do post, especially if you haven't already: I would love to hear what you're all up to!