Saturday, August 13, 2005

Olivia's Birthday




Olivia turned four years old on August 3rd. Here are some pictures from her birthday party. Her friends Caroline, Laurel, and Elise Kuyrkendall, and Mollie, William, Hannah, and Andrew Bradford came over to celebrate and help eat the cake.

Missions and Archeology?


When Lehigh Valley PCA was with us they spent a considerable part of their time laying a new sewer line for the Larco church. While they were digging, unbeknownst to the diggers, they uncovered a small piece of preIncan pottery called a "huaco" (the "hu" makes a "w" sound). This pottery was a small jug used normally as a container for a native corn wiskey called "chicha."

In the early 1980s when an apartment complex was being built next door to our church (only a few meters from our wall), the construction crew discovered an ancient preMoche (the Moches supposedly date from AD 1-800) religious site. Archeologists from the National University of Trujillo did a quick and hasty dig and found a lot of pottery, along with some gold and silver. Like much of Peru's archeological sites, however, a lack of funding kept it from ever being thoroughly investigated, and soon the apartments went up.

Well, to get back to our story, after the Lehigh Valley team left, a team from Statesboro, GA was covering the ditch and discovered the piece of pottery that had recently been dug up. It is perfectly preserved, but it lacks any of the usual paint and markings usually associated with pottery from the Moche civilization. This would seem to confirm our hunch that it was part of the same preMoche site that had been hastily excavated five meters from our wall, in the 1980s.

All such pottery, I'm told, belong to the Peruvian state, but I currently have it sitting on my desk. I don't expect that they will come to claim it any time soon, but to be sure, you shouldn't delay your visit to Trujillo. Come see us and we'll gladly show it off. :-)