Category: Blog

With the help of Bernie Mittelstaedt, I photographed the monuments of La Florida over two nights on April 9-10, 2019. Joanne Baron, considered today’s expert on the site and its monuments, had already been working at the site for some time, but my own work there was not part of her project. I had contacted her about my intentions, and she gave me the green light.  However, any arrangements to photograph would have to be made by me and Bernie after we arrived there.

We had just come from La Libertad where, three years prior, again thanks to Bernie’s incredible diplomatic skills, we had gotten permission to photograph pieces in the municipality (Corpus Volume 7: Itzimte Stelae at La Libertad, Petén, Guatemala). I returned this year, 2019, to present La Libertad alcalde Benjamin Ipiña printed photographs of the monuments suitable for hanging. He was very appreciative. When Bernie mentioned our intention to go to the site of La Florida in the town of El Naranjo, the alcalde made a call for us and paved the way.

Arriving in El Naranjo around midday we went first to see the alcalde, to tell him our intentions and to get his blessings. Later in the evening, Bernie arranged for us to enter the military base where many of the monuments were located. The site itself is scattered throughout the town and the military base, with one of the main archaeological plazas now serving as a soccer field, a soccer field with monuments on the edges.

Now, some four years later, I am happy to present to you, our readers, this collection of photographs.

-Bruce Love

Corpus Volume 14: Monuments from La Florida Namaan, Petén, Guatemala

Dear Readers,

With this corpus volume, we at Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies (CtMS) begin a new practice of publishing photographs of monuments without accompanying drawings. Up to now, all of our Corpus Volumes present photographs and drawings side-by-side, following the tradition established by the great Ian Graham in his Peabody Museum corpus volumes. But the time it takes to produce good, careful drawings has held up publication of important volumes of stone monuments that would be welcome contributions to the field. That, of course, is our mission at CtMS: publish and make accessible to our worldwide body of researchers valuable data ripe for analysis and interpretation.

Back in 2008, I began photographing monuments using a particular technique, taught to me by Jorge Pérez de Lara, that uses a powerful, professional-grade flash unit in the dark, held by an assistant some meters away from the object at a steep, raking angle, synced to the camera. The camera can then be hand-held because the flash freezes any hand motion. This eliminates the need for generators and tripods, allowing for the proper recordation of multiple monuments per evening.

As I grew in experience, I began also creating drawing aids for each monument. These drawing aids are made by coming in close with the camera, still hand-held, and capturing single glyph blocks or groups of glyph blocks while the assistant turns down the power of the flash and comes in close, like eighteen inches close, and goes around the glyph block, one click at a time, capturing each glyph with up to a dozen different light angles.

Then, back at home, I develop the “portrait” shots, the straight-on views of the entire monument with the raking light, using both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, to produce the final portrait. Then whoever makes the drawings of the glyphs can use the drawing aids to make drawings overlying the portraits.

I have been photographing monuments now over multiple field seasons, my latest being 2022 and my next being 2025. I have many sites and museum collections “in the can,” and I am collecting volumes of photographs far quicker than drawings can be produced, so I reached out to a number of my colleagues and asked what they thought about the idea of publishing photographs without drawings, and the response was unanimous: do it!

Just as a teaser, let me say I have complete corpora of the known inscriptions from Chichen Itza; Uxmal; the Lithic Museum at Tikal; the entire country of Belize (except for pieces in U.S. Museums that I am planning to get soon), including Pusilha in the British Museum; the monuments of La Florida Namaan; the monuments of Takalik Abaj; the collection of fragments from Naranjo and the whole stelae of Naranjo at the municipio in Melchor de Mencos; the captives of Dzibanche; Moral Reforma Stela 1 and 2 at the Pellicer Museum in Villahermosa; and Stela 13 and 31 at Yaxha. Pending permissions, all these monuments are in line to be published. Furthermore, according to Milan Kováč, the entire corpus of Uaxactun is scheduled to be released shortly in a separate publication.

We also plan to make the drawing aids for each monument available through links to online storage, so that you, our subscribers, can make your own drawings.

This volume on Oxpemul, Campeche (without drawing aids, unfortunately, because I wasn’t making drawing aids in those earliest days of my photographic efforts), marks the first in a series of corpora of monuments to be published without accompanying drawings. May the information on these stones spur new discoveries and interpretations of Maya history.

-Bruce Love

Corpus Volume 13: Monuments from Oxpemul, Campeche