A Practical Look at the First Week

The first week of any field season in the Trujillo valley forces you to make quick decisions about what to document and what to leave for later. When we opened the site at Cerro Blanco, the priority was to map the visible stone boxes before the morning light shifted. We had three hours, two measuring tapes, and a notebook that was already damp from the coastal mist.

We chose to focus on the northern slope because the surface finds there — fragments of red-slipped bowls and a single intact caja with a lid — suggested a domestic context rather than a ceremonial one. That distinction mattered for the excavation plan: domestic layers are usually shallower, but they contain more organic residue for radiocarbon dating.

By day three, the tradeoffs became clear. The stone boxes on the northern slope were smaller than expected, roughly 40 by 30 centimetres, and many had been disturbed by root growth. We had to decide whether to lift them whole or record them in situ and leave them. We lifted two, and the rest were photographed, drawn, and covered again. That decision saved time but means we may never know what was inside the others.

The pottery fragments told a different story. The mineral composition of the red slip matched samples from a kiln site six kilometres east, which supports the idea that these households were part of a local production network rather than isolated units. We collected twelve diagnostic sherds, all from the same stratigraphic layer, and sent them for thin-section analysis.

Looking back, the first week was less about discovery and more about sorting signal from noise. The practical constraints — limited daylight, uneven terrain, the need to protect fragile contexts — shaped every decision. That is the reality of fieldwork, and it is worth writing down because it changes how you interpret the final report.