Chontal

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Documentation Objectives
The principal investigators will conduct documentation fieldwork in the Lowland Chontalpa to produce specific descriptive products and to assemble a data set suitable for future interdisciplinary analyses. The specific objectives are:

Collection of mythical-historical narratives concerning native Chontal past.
These narratives complement and contrast the academic culture-historical reconstructions with the Chontals’ perception, transmission and explanation of their own history and world vision. The narratives will be recorded through film and audio in interview sessions.

San Sebastian Church, Huamelula

Documentation of local knowledge on prominent landmarks, territorial boundary markers and abandoned settlement sites.
For a better and holistic understanding of Chontal culture heritage, this information not only facilitates future study and protection of the archaeological and cultural heritage, it also acknowledges what value it has to the local inhabitants. In addition, we will be able to relate such changes to the settlement trajectories of these communities, since the historical record of the last 100 years tells about community fission, and village relocations. Local knowledge will be recorded in narratives and questionnaires. Interviews will be accompanied by filmed and photographed reconnaissance visits to these sites.

Hammock in country patio

Recording of Chontal terminology of agricultural and environmental phenomena.
To better understand traditional Chontal settlement patterns, socioeconomic and ritual practices, this reference material illuminates the archaeological, ethnohistorical, and social patterns. The term lists include categories such as soil classification and use, folk-botany, material culture, and climatic phenomena.

Chontal descriptions of traditional cultural practices.
Ritual, social, and economic activities may involve the Chontal language and customs to a different degree. This compilation provides insights on how such contemporary practices are rooted in autochthonous behavior patterns.

Guille's home altar	Petrona's All Saints´Altar	All Saints' Altar, Huatulco restaurant

Dictionaries.
The goal is to produce a final Chontal-Spanish-English dictionary with 5,000 entries for use in local bilingual education. The final dictionary will be produced in thematically-based increments, as suggested in Mosel (2002), starting with simple wordlists to check completeness of a particular semantic domain and to coordinate orthography conventions. It is hoped that printed versions will be immediately useful in the classroom setting and will enthuse participation in the project. Gaps in lexical fields will be identified and filled through elicitation.

Grammatical description.
The grammatical description will be in ‘basic linguistic’ notation to increase transparency and facilitate analysis from any framework. The grammatical sketch chapter of O’Connor’s dissertation will be supplemented in (at least) the following ways:

•    The phonetics/phonology section is to be expanded, incorporating more of Waterhouse’s analyses and enriched by acoustic analysis through the (independent) postdoctoral project of Dr. Heriberto Avelino and Dr. Ian Maddieson, University of California at Berkeley.
•    The morphology of the noun phrase requires further description in every aspect.
•    The demonstrative system, a veritable treasure trove of clitics and cliticization patterns, requires analysis and explanation.

The constituent structure and the routinized syntactic patterns of the language are to be represented with examples from texts, especially with respect to the discourse functions of variations in flexible word order.

Bread man, for All Saints' Day

Electronic archive of video, audio and text files.
During the initial preparation phase of the grant, existing texts will be thoroughly catalogued by genre, and preliminary transcription of unprocessed texts will be prepared for checking with the transcriptionist. From this list, we can evaluate which genres are lacking. The current corpus includes narratives (personal, historical, procedural) and folktales, with a few songs, dreams, poems and descriptions of ritual. Known gaps include jokes, ritual speech and conversation. Additional recordings of audio and video data will be collected, with emphasis on examples of missing genres, such as territorial, historical, and subsistence-related topics.

All entries in the archive will be identified as to speaker, date, place, topic, genre, and will include any other orienting notes pertinent to the recording. Time-aligned transcriptions will be prepared for as many video and audio files as possible, and as many texts as possible will be glossed and translated into Spanish and English.