This paper employs long-term research on Yucatec Maya to propose an approach to fieldwork on deixis' semantics and pragmatics, arguing that participants' access (perceptual, cognitive, social) to the referent constitutes the basis of deixis. Fieldwork should furthermore focus on ordinary usage, on native speakers' metalinguistic glosses of deictics, and on the paradigmatic oppositions among deictic expressions, whilst conducting elicitation in the target language.