New and totally awesome banner coming soon!

Exciting blog-related news. With a bottle of not-bad $10 Cote du Rhone (and a glass of water of course!) I worked on a banner for the site. Thankfully my mom did have a copy of Corel Draw 10 (not to make a shameless plug or anything, but its a good graphic design program I'm pretty comfortable with) on her computer so I was able to use that along with Photoshop. Using pictures swiped from the computer at my old apartment I created my own design, mainly because whatever blogger has up there is just...ugh. Boring. And the results I must say are pretty awesome, nothing prize-winning but something I think people will find cool or interesting.

I basically used pictures taken during my first field season in Peru (in 2004) and from our last trip to Mexico when we went to Teotihuacan in September of 2007. The banner is bookended with pictures featuring yours truly, one in Peru and the other carefully negotiating down the stairs of the Pyriamid of the Sun. Then there are two shots of Teotihuacan--one of the Pyriamid of the Sun and the other of this amazing puma mural. Finally, in the middle is this awesome picture I took of the elite burial we discovered that field season in Peru--you'll have to see the banner to check it out. The whole thing is bordered in heavy black lines with the name of the blog emblazoned across the pictures. I think I picked a pretty cool font that matches the spirit of the blog and the banner itself.

Boardered on top of the banner is a yellow bar and a white bar, outlined in black, while on the bottom there is a blue bar and a red bar, also outlined in black. While this color scheme would have been pleasent anyway, the colors were conciously chosen. As I consider myself an Mesoamericanist--of sorts--it makes sense. See, in Mesoamerican cosmology the colors black, red, blue, yellow and white are sacred--with the last two being intechangable. There are four world trees that support the universe at each corner--and each tree has a color associated with it. Additionally, each tree is associated with a same colored Tezcatlipoca or deity. The dieties are also referred to as the four Tlalocs or Tlalolque. The colors and the diety they are associated with varies, but usually the color black is associated with the true Tezcatlipoca, blue with the water diety Tlaloc, and yellow or white with Quetzalocoatl. In the Aztec pantheon, the last diety of the four was of course Huitzilopochtli, but this was a change from the original Nahua configuration (which I won't go into at the moment).

Suffice to say, the new banner rocks, and I can't wait to debut it...once I figure out how to get it on blogger, of course.