Maya Yucatán: An Artist's Journey

Foreword

xi I have been blessed with artists in my life, so when I found myself in Palenque with Phil Hofstetter and Don Bright while they filmed a documentary about Merle Greene Robertson, I gave them my best effort. Phil befriended me and showed up at Yaxuná, cameras in tow, ready to go to work. He wanted to create a new kind of record of an archaeological project, a film record that went beyond the normal frames of time and logistics and plot to encompass the unfolding sense of things. Everyone on the project soon learned that Phil was much more than a photographer and filmmaker. He had many roles, first and foremost companion on the journey, friend, witness, councilor ,“safety officer” (an inside joke as it is sometimes difficult to get field archaeologists to look out for themselves)—the list is a long one. He was part of the project. It’s as simple as that. He was as necessary to the normal practice of the work as everyone else there, and in many ways particularly important to the life of the camp. But he is a photographer of exceptional genius and eye and a remarkable film documentary master in Maya archaeology. I have learned to at least catch a glimmer of how that genius captures images of antiquity, archaeology, the Maya, which always make my heart leap, images that ornament this book. He has a way of being there. Over the many years we have collaborated in the field, I have never ceased to admire his disappearing act. Phil has an uncanny ability, when filming events or activities on an archaeological project, to become virtually invisible when he wants to. I think it has to do with the way that he becomes part of the social fabric of the work. The archaeologists and the Maya know he is there. But, accepting that he is doing his job just as they are doing theirs, people generally ignore him while focusing on the task at hand. In this way, Phil disappears into the ambient scene he is photographing. While his mind is contemplating foreword Being There in Yucatán | David Freidel Fallen facade at Kiuic. xii / Foreword light and composition, his being is in the moment, engendering image. Incidentally it’s different when Phil wants a sit-down interview. I have never minded talking to cameras, but some people in the field find it hard, at least at first, and it takes sensitivity and skill to draw them out as Phil does. After a while they get used to it, and they have in the process learned something about being public archaeologists. Phil is what we anthropologists call a good participant observer . Once he had participated in one archaeological project, he followed friendship networks to more. Gradually Phil came to have a uniquely informed perspective, visual and otherwise, on the field of internationally collaborative archaeology in Yucatán. The field is a portal, suspended beyond the ordinary experiences of academic campus life somewhere out in the general direction of creative encounter. Archaeologists pride themselves on being scientists disciplined to make meticulous observation in the field. When excavating, they get just one chance to get the observational record right, a pressure-laden experience that healthy projects balance with improvised R & R. Like a Zen master, Phil could sometimes stop the clock right in the middle of a stressful day. One image sticks: a photo of Phil’s face looking at the camera while a butterfly harvests sweat from his forehead. Most The Monjas Plaza at Chichén Itzá. Foreword / xiii of the time, he just does what he can to cleanse the camp of those stresses everyone brings back with them, packed in their minds and bodies along with the irreplaceable observations of their craft. He understands and comfortably inhabits the in-between places where archaeologists find themselves when trying to decompress. In those places archaeologists sift through their experiences of the day or take breaks from conscious effort through seemingly absurd activities like croquet played by rules of which the Red Queen would likely have approved. Science is, of course, a creative process, and field science needs open and flexible minds. Flexing minds is an art that Phil performs among archaeologists even as he observes and records in his own ways. After the Yaxuná Project ended, Phil kept right on participating in archaeological projects in Yucatán and, to my...