Uhle Grave Lots

The bulk of my time over the past week has been spent reconstructing the grave lots and their associated goods so that within the exhibit these items can be displayed together as they may represent a complete view of Andean burial practices, or life in the Andes in general. Below is the process I went through to acquire these:

1. Uhle's Pachacamac volume. Clark had mentioned that Uhle listed a few grave lots in his published account. When I looked through them I found that he had mentioned two, but when discussing them in the text mixed them up and made it quite hard to figure out which number belonged to which of the 8 different cotton tunics mentioned, etc. One grave lot from here was successful and includes two black vicuna textiles, which if their identification is correct would show a very high ranking individual from the highlands being buried at Pachacamac or remarkable trade taking place (even though I imagine wearing vicuna on the coast would not be comfortable).

2. Database search. When Uhle originally cataloged the collection he would write out all of the artifacts associated with one mummy bundle (field and museum numbers) on the remarks part for one of these artifacts, the remaining objects would have a notation saying "See #####" referring to the record for the artifact (normally a false mummy head, human cranium, or a ceramic vessel) that contained the list of grave goods. I ran a search for the all artifacts from Pachacamac with the word "See" in their notes field. This returned a limited number of results.

3. Catalog cards. Because Uhle primarily recorded this information towards the beginning of the numbering sequence I flipped through the catalog cards to find any sorts of leads. This lead to the majority of the grave lots that have been compiled. I noticed a pattern that most of these artifacts were from either "Gravefield I" or "Beneath the Temple of Pachacamaj", and became concerned over the lack of context from the Sun Temple. After looking furiously through the card catalog I asked Clark and he mentioned the original ledgers.

4. Original ledgers. Finally, I consulted the ledgers to see if I missed anything from the Sun Temple. Turns out I hadn't. Something must have happened when excavating at the Sun Temple, because the artifacts lack any sort of context and associations between them. Will our reconstructions and peopling of this part of the site be primarily conjecture then?

5. Excel legwork. After having all of the information for each artifact (accession number, field number, description, and current location), I entered each grave lot into a worksheet in Excel and randomly assigned them grave lot numbers. There are 27 grave lots to work with during the rest of the summer. Then I checked my inventory sheet from the duration of this project to see if the objects had been previously photographed, and if so, when. All of this information went into another Excel document that was shipped off to Clark in the hopes that he will work with the new interns to expedite the photography of these artifacts so we can begin to digitally recreate them.

While Carly will be later posting the bulk of the material that we learned today during Dr. Anne Tibali's Archaeological Textile Course, I wanted to mention a few key items. Primarily, we were able to videotape a student spinning alpaca wool. Is there anything I should keep in mind when taping or downloading these images (file size, quality, type, etc)? Secondarily, the lecture on Pre-Ceramic coastal Peru was very relevant in that it was the beginning (but certainly not the end) of ceremonial architecture on the coast. Moseley brings it up in his article from Dumbarton-Oaks, and I'm thinking it would be advantageous to compare Caral to Pachacamac to see the relationship between the adobe styles. In addition, our work with single set structures was informative and will help us understand more how items such as slings react in the real world in order to accurately recreate them.