Cover Photo "to site, from memory" by Emily Draicchio
This is a photo I took on one of my last days at an excavation in northern Peru, at a Moche and Lambayeque period site. Each morning unfolded the same: wake up at 5:00am, eat breakfast, pull on your field clothes, grab your equipment, endure a 30-minute drive, get dropped off, and start your 45-minute trek across the dune-filled desert with pounds of gear on your back, until finally you see the ruins you excavated yesterday and start digging again. The trip to site itself was rhythmic; the sand seemed to pulse with our collective routine. That same sand blurred time, as the ruins we exposed of households whispered through the grain filled wind of past daily routines undertaken by its original residents. But visual memory doesn’t serve me well. I have that thing where you can’t envision images in your head. You know aphantasia? Instead, I hold onto descriptive words and get lost as they bounce in my brain. Sand, a lot of it, in my ears and nose. Adobe walls peeking out from dunes. Ceramics crunching beneath each step. Sweat dripping down my back. The taste of sunscreen on my tongue. The smell of the ocean carried inland by the wind. And, almost every morning, the glowing pink horizon at sunrise. These fragments of ruins in the sand, rhythms of routine, and memories of my other sense are what I remember but can never picture. This image is my attempt to imagine the memory I cannot hold visually.
