Remember the picture last week of all those old 1.44 mb discs? I went through all of them to make sure I had all the files on them before throwing them out & found some pictures from Peru, all from the excavations at Conchopata in 2001.


This action shot is of Juan Carlos & myself collecting samples for radiocarbon dating from the floor of a room (or patio, I can't remember). If I remember correctly, the dates we have from those buildings suggest they were built after 800 AD.


We did not find any child/juvenile burials during the field seasons of 1999 & 2000. Over the course of a 2 week span in 2001 we found a bunch of child/juvenile burials like the one above. Most were found underneath the floors of rooms, most were single individuals in a flexed position, and I think most or all had pots on their heads like this little fella.



Here's JC malking on the un-excavated bulk from EA-143, a sunken circular building. I directed the excavation of the building and it ended up being pretty cool.

The picture above is of the steps down into the building, and in the center of the building was a small, stone lined cist (about 1m wide and 1m deep. The building was some sort of ritual space - we found no evidence that people cooked, processed foo, made pots, or any of the other kind of daily activities people may have done. The floor was covered in about 4=6 inches of ash, suggesting that the last thing people did in the building before it was abandoned was to burn a bunch of stuff inside it. In the back of the building, opposite of the steps, we found 22 human skulls on the floor and a few human hands (can't remember how many). Most of the skulls have small holes drilled into them that were likely used to put them on strings, and most have cut marks indicative of de-fleshing, meaning these weren't old skulls they had lying around but were taken from living people.




This is one of the smaller Conchopata style urns (and an empty bottle of rum).