Story Cycles in Chol (Mayan) Mythology: Contextualizing Classic Iconography
with Nicholas A. Hopkins, Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, Ashley Kistler, and Kayla Price

Field Work

The field work for this project began in early June, 2002. Principal project personnel (Dr. J. Kathryn Josserand, Dr. Nicholas A. Hopkins, and Sarah Ashley Kistler, a doctoral student in Anthropology at Florida State University; see Figure 1) flew from Tallahassee, Florida, to Cancún, Yucatán, México, and took a bus to Mérida to pick up a rented van. We then traveled to Zoh Laguna, Campeche, México (Figure 2, shown below), to secure housing for a later phase of field work. Rental of a suitable facility being arranged (Figure 3, shown below), we moved to the area of Palenque, Chiapas, México, to begin the collection of materials in the Chol language. In Palenque, we were joined by our colleague in Chol research, Ausencio Cruz Guzmán, a bilingual Chol and Spanish speaker.

Working from a base in Palenque, we first carried out interviews in the nearby community of La Cascada (south and east of Palenque, on the road to Chancalá and Bonampak; see Figure 4, shown below). Interviews with members of an extended family resulted in several audio cassette recordings, accompanied by digital audio tape and video recordings of the interviews (see Appendix III: Interviews and Recordings). Another interview was conducted in Palenque, with an elderly monolingual Chol couple from San Pedro Sabana, municipio of Salto de Agua. In this interview, we were joined by Karen Bassie, who was in the area collecting Chol materials for another FAMSI project.

After several days in Palenque, we moved our base to Tumbalá, Chiapas, one of the principal Chol-speaking towns of Highland Chiapas; activities in the Tumbalá area were coordinated with those of Karen Bassie and her colleagues. A series of story-telling interviews was carried out in Tumbalá, including an interview with a bilingual Chol poet (see Peñate Montejo 1999). The last week of June, we retrieved equipment and supplies from a storage facility in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, and transferred these materials to Zoh Laguna to begin the last phase of field work (Figure 5, shown above, and Figure 6, shown below). During the final phase of field work we concentrated on the transcription, translation, and keyboarding of materials collected in the initial phase. We also carried out more interviews, in two Chol communities in the vicinity of Zoh Laguna (Figure 7, shown below). During this phase of work, the research team was joined by Kayla Price, a recent Anthropology graduate of FSU. Field work ended in late July with the preparation of materials for transfer to the United States and the return of equipment to San Cristóbal. Work continues on the analysis of materials collected and the preparation of publications resulting from the project.

The 16 interviews carried out during field work were recorded in a variety of media, resulting in 17 audio cassette tapes, 12 digital audio tapes, 13 digital video tapes, and a large number of digital still photographs of storytellers and their families. Standard cassette tapes facilitated transcription of the interviews; the digital media will ultimately be edited together to form an audio-visual corpus of modern Chol storytellers. Transcriptions, translations, and analyses of the folktales recorded will be prepared for publication in suitable formats.

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