Kulubá Archaeological Project 2001 Field Season

Project Methodology

The first step in mapping the lower-order sites in the region was the practical matter of deciding how close a site needed to be to Kulubá in order to be reasonably considered part of the polity. We decided that all sites within 15km of Kulubá were potential targets for our mapping efforts. The main reason we chose this distance was because Dzonot Aké, a large site mapped a number of years ago by Webster (1979), is almost exactly 15km away to the northwest and we reasoned that this site is too large to be considered part of the Kulubá polity.

As much background research as possible was done before heading out to the field. After consulting the Atlas maps, the corresponding files at CRY-INAH in Mérida were consulted. Two sites, San Pedro and Santa Monica, had been located by the Atlas surveys and forms filled out by David Vlcek in 1976 were copied. Since Vlcek was essentially doing a road survey in this area of Yucatán, it is no coincidence that San Pedro and Santa Monica are near paved roads and easy to find. Barrera Rubio’s Project had identified two other sites, Yun Ak and San Matias, and he kindly provided a (then) unpublished map showing the location of these recently recorded sites.

Once at a site, the first objective was taking a GPS point with a hand-held satellite geolocator which gave the UTM coordinates of the site. We used a Garmin GPS 12XL model which has an accuracy range of about 10 meters. Mapping during the 2001 Kulubá Archaeological Project was done using a Nikon NTD-2 manual total station. This instrument features optical angles that are read through a veneer while distance is calculated digitally by bouncing a laser off of a prism mounted on a stadia rod. To begin mapping, an arbitrary origin point was chosen (usually the highest point at the site) and the total station aligned north using a Brunton compass. All subsequent measurements were made relative to this first transit set-up so great care was made to make it as accurate as possible. Most of the sites were located in open ranches so mapping proceeded quite rapidly as visible architecture didn’t need to be cleared. In other instances where vegetation covered all or part of a site, a clearing crew consisting of five workers would systematically clear the vegetation off of structures ahead of the mapping team. Once at a freshly cleared structure, pin flags were inserted into the ground to mark the outline of the structure and finer architectural details like wall lines, metates, and stairways. These flags were then shot in with the manual total station. The points taken were written down in a field book and this information was then hand-entered into a laptop computer and point plots were available in the program AutoCAD within minutes. These plots were then taken to the field the next day in order to generate accurate sketch-maps of every mapped structure. Point distributions were also entered into the program Surfer in order to generate topographic detail of the mapped sites. Because surface ceramics were so sparse (no doubt due to the extensive trampling action of cattle within the ranches), we conducted "grab" samples of sherds off of individual structures. In sum, mapping done with the manual total station is accurate to within centimeters and provides in some cases micro-detail of some of the architectural features of structures as well as a sense of the general topography of each site. The great advantage of having all of the maps computerized from the start is that it makes for easy editing and rapid analysis-there is no need for time consuming drafting once the computerized map has been generated. Dimensions of structures and the distances between them are all easily calculated with a few keystrokes.

We were unable to work at every site we were interested in. We ran out of time and could not work at Kaptun (previously unrecorded), San Luis (16Qe(4):6), and Sihomal (16Qd(6):12). We were refused permission to work at San Matias, a small site east of Kulubá that was first recorded by Barrera Rubio’s Project. Local informants in the pueblo of San Luis Tzuk Tuk led us to a site called San Antonio but this "site" turned out to be only 2.5km southeast of Kulubá’s site center. We decided that the residential settlement we saw at San Antonio was likely within the urban zone of Kulubá and opted not to work there. The sites that we did get to map include the Atlas sites of San Pedro and Santa Monica, Yun Ak, a site first identified by Barrera Rubio’s Project, and two previously unrecorded sites, Yokat and Ichmul de San Jose. What follows is a description of the mapping activities performed at these sites, presented in the order in which they were investigated.

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