Done (ish)

Hallelujah. Finally sent everything in after a long and frustrating day dealing with a bad internet connection and massive file sizes. At a few minutes to midnight, the countdown for the large file sending service I was using read 2 hours and some; after waiting 2 hours and some it read 1 hour and some, so I went to bed and let it load overnight. I hope everything made it to where it needed to go. There is a lot that I wish we could have captured in the animation, like the more discreet movements of the agents or the objects in the ritual like kero cups and the tills, but I don't have the technical know-how to understand whether that was ever really feasible (or how many more dozens of hours would have been needed to accomplish those tasks). I'd like to continue to fine-tune the ritual model, but perhaps what we need right now is a bit of time to think about it and recharge for next semester. It's been a tremendous learning process and I'm really grateful that I was pushed out of my comfort zone and forced to learn new software and new ways of thinking. This whole thing has encouraged me to think about the way I use different technologies and to recognize their flexibility... almost anything can be done if one has the patience and the chutzpa to go for it.

Almost

It's getting down to the wire. I've been working with Pengfei on creating the right map/grid so that he can more easily code the locations of various activities in the ritual. I've been using the 3D Warehouse to find small objects to use as markers on the map; I even found this great little jagged wall model which I 'exploded' and onto which I added a new texture taken from one of Dr. Erickson's Inca wall images. Sometime early this week, I think the whole group is going to get together to figure out how to finish this thing off once and for all; I'm really looking forward to the moment when it all comes together. In the meantime, I'm recording the voice over in English and looking around for good music to have in the background.

Update: Ritual Confusion

As I have mentioned in class, I've been trying to come up with an account of the first corn planting ritual of the season, which seems to occur on August 18, the day of the anti-zenith. Bauer's account has the Inca king with four noblemen and their wives sewing seeds in the field of Sausero, which is near the (long-gone) Arco Punto and the fields in which Mama Huaco and Manco Capac were alleged to have sewn the first seed after defeating the jungle people. He says that they sing haylli (war songs) to celebrate their triumph over the earth, and a white llama with gold adornments is prepared in the center of the field for sacrifice. Guinea pigs are also sacrificed, according to Bauer's piecing together of stories, and the commoners all assemble and watch while everything is happening. Onlookers drink and pour chicha throughout the ritual. Bauer does not discuss the cosmological significance of this date in August; he does not mention the anti-zenith, as Zuidema was quick to point out, and he does not discuss the viewing of the sunset at Quispicancha from the Ushnu in the plaza or the ritual procession along the ceque that leads to Quispicancha (which Mama Huaco apparently traversed long ago). Zuidema also mentioned the Priests of the Sun (children of thunder), as well as the fact that the ritual took place on a field that was not intended for true agriculture.

I am attempting to reconcile these two very different conceptions of the ritual, from Zuidema's intensly astronomical/cosmological, ceque-oriented account to Bauer's ceremony-oriented, war-over-nature account. Brigitte and I are teaming up to get to the bottom of this (with Prof. Erickson's help), and I fear that we will either have to pick one account and stick to it (and accept that we are missing parts of the story), try to mesh multiple stories (at the expense of losing some factuality), or find a new ritual to study that has a better written record from which to draw information.