The quirks of expeditionary civilization

One of a series of blog posts written during the Field Museum's 2010 Yaguas rapid inventory of Yaguas, Peru, and published by the New York Times.

"Here’s a list of the things I found on the lab table this morning: a bottle of formol; a toothbrush; a Tupperware container full of fish; a spoon; a strip of orange flagging on which someone had written “Do Not Touch – Fer de Lance – Danger”; no fer de lance; a packet of Tang; a couple of muddy rocks; calipers; a kerosene lamp; stacks of old newspaper (“Rural telephone use up 29%”); a GPS device; endless plastic bags, two with frogs in them; a reprint from Occasional Papers of the Zoological Museum of the University of São Paulo, which has fallen off the table and gotten muddy; a can of tuna; fishing nets with bright yellow floats; a fruit cut in half; and a rolled-up satellite image of the region."

Read the whole post here.

Photo by Álvaro del Campo