Greetings from Oconahua!
I’ve lived in this town for over a week now and am slowly getting used to it and life here. It is a much smaller town than Teuchitlan and has much less going on. There are very few shops or places to eat here and the archaeological site gets only a handful of visitors a week while the site in Teuchitlan now often gets hundreds or even thousands a day.

My work is now well under way, with me spending many hours a day staring at broken pieces of pottery and recording information about them. The pottery is anywhere from about 600-2000 years old, depending on which particular piece I’m examining at the time. It sounds like it could be interesting, but I assure you that it is not—at least not after the first hour or so. But this work is what I am here to do and will be occupying the majority of my waking hours until just before Christmas.
My photos this week are both from the town I am now living in. The first is a helpful map of the town. It is painted on the side of the first building that you encounter when entering the town from the highway. As I mentioned before, the town is quite hilly and all the streets are cobblestone. The house I am living in is in the bottom right hand corner of the map. If you look at the map closely, you can see 2 red and black shapes (they are supposed to be pyramids) . The street to the left of them is the one I live on. Follow it to the bottom of the map, and there I am waving at you. The two blue things that look like large rivers are in fact arroyos and are both dry except for during and just after a downpour. There are a few other points of interest on the map. One is the black line to the left of town. That is the highway that connects us to the outside world and is where I go running since it is pretty much the only flat and even surface around. On the far right side of the map there are a couple of rectangles that denote the location of the soccer fields. The map has one labeled as belonging to Oconahua and the other to a neighboring town. The bottom left area of the map has a large rectangular area with little marks in it. Those are crosses and that is the town cemetery. I’ve not made it there for a visit yet, although it is only a couple of blocks from the house. In another 2 months it will be all decorated for the Day of the Dead, so I’ll probably take lots of photos of it then. It was a rather noisy location this weekend because of a funeral. Much like the jazz funerals of New Orleans, the funeral processions here include a live (and noisy) band that accompany the procession to the church and then to the cemetery.

The second photo is looking down the street I live on from the center of town. I live way down at the bottom of the hill. You may have noticed that the house on the right side of the picture is made of adobe. There are quite a few adobe houses here in Oconahua. They are almost completely all gone now in Teuchitlan, but are still pretty common here. A fair number of people here live in small houses with only 1 or 2 rooms and use the yard for activities like cooking, doing laundry, and raising livestock. When I return to the house from my morning run, I can often see women out under a tin roof connected to the back of their house cooking breakfast. The house I’m staying in is pretty basic, but it is a modern mansion compared with what seems to be the typical house here.