Final Report of the 2000 Yo’okop Field Season: Initial Mapping and Surface Collections
Justine M. Shaw, Dave Johnstone, and Ruth Krochock

Plans for Future Documentation of Carved Stone Monuments

Seven monuments decorated with carved hieroglyphics and iconography were either discovered or rediscovered during the 2000 field season. We plan to employ a combination of techniques to further document these monuments next season. Night photography will be employed rather than daylight photography because it allows for total control of lighting bringing out carved details not visible by day. A car battery will serve as a makeshift generator to power two bright lamps. Agfa black & white film will be used because it provides good contrast and can be developed and printed without specialized processing.

Rubbings produced on special rice paper that does not contain sizing will provide another view of the carved details on the monuments. Merle Greene Robertson, who has produced hundreds of rubbings throughout the entire Maya area (Greene Robertson 1995), has advised us in great detail on the techniques and materials needed for this procedure.

Preliminary pencil on paper field drawings will be produced of all the inscriptions and iconography. This step provides crucial first-hand viewing of all the visible details and will increase the accuracy of the finished ink drawings. The final drawings, done with permanent ink on Mylar, will facilitate analysis of the epigraphic and iconographic data.

The drawings, photographs, and rubbings will ultimately be saved to CD-ROMs to preserve the data and to make them available for other scholars. The drawings will also be posted on the internet. Krochock has produced similar CD-ROMs of rubbings from Chichén Itzá in a previous (1996) FAMSI project. The programs, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator will be employed to aid in the production of quality drawings and to allow manipulation of the images for better viewing of details. Following the documentation of the monuments, Krochock will provide a final analysis of the hieroglyphic inscriptions and iconography.

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