Rebecca Bria’s ready to dig.

This summer, the senior archaeology major and another NIU honors student will leave DeKalb for an archaeological dig in the Peruvian desert. The trip begins in June and goes through August.

Bria was nominated by anthropology professor Winifred Creamer to accompany her and her husband. The honors program will help pay for Bria’s adventure, as well as for one other student yet to be chosen. The students will stay at a beach house in Barranca, almost 100 miles north of Lima on the Peruvian coast, but will experience the foggy and cooler weather that accompanies Peru’s winter.

This summer’s work involves an archaeological survey of large mounds, about 300 feet on a side and 30 feet tall, that are similar to truncated pyramids, or pyramids with flat tops, Creamer said.

The mounds appear as piles of stones, but after some excavation, terraces and parts of rooms have been discovered inside them, Creamer said.

“We decided it would be very worthwhile to go down and really look at some of the other large sites and see if they’re all from the same time and try to figure out how old they were, and was it just the Supe Valley that had these things?” she said. “We think the tallest ones were temples of some kind.”

Creamer first visited Peru in 1995 as part of NIU External Programs and traveled there again in 1999 and 2000.

She and her husband, a curator at the Chicago Field Museum, both speak Spanish and have experience in South American archaeological digs. They are working on the project with professor Ruth Shady, an anthropology professor at Lima’s San Marcos University.

The Creamers had to obtain permission to survey and excavate the area by submitting a proposal to the Peruvian government. Their previous archaeological experience in Peru — as well as the fact that they work with a Peruvian colleague — helped them obtain permission, Creamer said.

Bria is excited about the opportunity — her second after a “field school” trip to Sicily last summer.

“It’s a great experience, especially just coming out of undergraduate studies,” she said. “It will give me a different perspective on what part of the world I want to work in because I want to do archaeology as a profession.”

Bria thinks the experience will be very different than last summer’s trip to Sicily, where she had comforts that might not be as common in Peru, a poorer country.

Creamer said the experience could lead to more special opportunities for the students, such as graduate thesis work or co-writing a publication.

The students also will be able to improve their Spanish. Creamer nominated Bria for the trip because of her experience with the Spanish language and archaeology.

“She has a very good background, which is very important because we’re going to be far away from home,” Creamer said. “And she’s an excellent student.”