Maya Glyphs Research Articles

The archaeoastronomy of Tikal: A reanalysis

AbstractAt the great city of Tikal, the ancient Maya placed and oriented their ceremonial architecture and monuments in accordance with cosmological principles. Its earliest ceremonial plaza, the Mundo Perdido, is one of the oldest pre‐Classic E‐Groups of the Petén, the astronomical utility of which has been a topic of debate by archeologists and archaeoastronomers alike over the past century. In 1988, Aveni and Hartung surveyed the great temples of Tikal and revealed the relationship between their astronomical and dynastic aspects. Yet, over the intervening decades breakthroughs in the decipherment of the Maya glyphs have greatly increased our understanding of Tikal's dynastic history while interpretations in the field of archaeoastronomy have become more rigorous. For instance, more recent surveys and interpretations by Ŝprajc (2021a, 2021b) have demonstrated the importance of the Maya ritual calendar in the placement and orientation of ceremonial public architecture. The aim of this paper is to reassess this earlier fieldwork in archaeoastronomy, provide recent corroborative measurements of the orientation of key buildings, and provide a cohesive summation of the cosmological principles found in the design and construction of the city of Tikal.

The Role of Maize and the Theoretical Approaches of Archaeology to the Food Resources in the Ancient Maya Culture

Several theoretical approaches exist for the study of ancient Maya cultures. In the beginning, only limited information was available for these cultures and the early portrayals were greatly influenced by European concepts of antiquity. After this period of Early Maya archaeology, however, the newly-developed processual archaeology was applied. Processualist theory focused on understanding the process of cultural change and relating it to environmental adaptation. Soon after its inception, criticism of this approach led to the emergence of post-processual archaeology, which stressed the importance of pre-Columbian Maya symbolism. In this case, the popularity of post-processualism was spearheaded by the decipherment of Maya glyphs and new information supporting cultural continuities between ancient and past Maya groups.Problems related to both approaches are well exemplified by the meaning of maize in the ancient Maya culture. Processual archaeology treats maize as merely a food source, while post-processualism regards maize as one of the most important sym-bols of the ancient Maya, a plant with a special status. Thus, research on ancient Maya subsistence and the meaning of maize in ancient belief systems have been based on interpretations that were constructed from a single perspective. However, to fully understand the role of maize in the Maya culture, we must integrate and apply different perspectives, multidisciplinary appro-aches and methodological dialectics. It is postulated that, in the future, past approaches will be complimented by newly retrieved information thanks to a new paradigm called symmetric anthropology.

How to Tell Ancient Signs Apart? Recognizing and Visualizing Maya Glyphs with CNNs

Thanks to the digital preservation of cultural heritage materials, multimedia tools (e.g., based on automatic visual processing) considerably ease the work of scholars in the humanities and help them to perform quantitative analysis of their data. In this context, this article assesses three different Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures along with three learning approaches to train them for hieroglyph classification, which is a very challenging task due to the limited availability of segmented ancient Maya glyphs. More precisely, the first approach, the baseline, relies on pretrained networks as feature extractor. The second one investigates a transfer learning method by fine-tuning a pretrained network for our glyph classification task. The third approach considers directly training networks from scratch with our glyph data. The merits of three different network architectures are compared: a generic sequential model (i.e., LeNet), a sketch-specific sequential network (i.e., Sketch-a-Net), and the recent Residual Networks. The sketch-specific model trained from scratch outperforms other models and training strategies. Even for a challenging 150-class classification task, this model achieves 70.3% average accuracy and proves itself promising in case of a small amount of cultural heritage shape data. Furthermore, we visualize the discriminative parts of glyphs with the recent Grad-CAM method, and demonstrate that the discriminative parts learned by the model agree, in general, with the expert annotation of the glyph specificity (diagnostic features). Finally, as a step toward systematic evaluation of these visualizations, we conduct a perceptual crowdsourcing study. Specifically, we analyze the interpretability of the representations from Sketch-a-Net and ResNet-50. Overall, our article takes two important steps toward providing tools to scholars in the digital humanities: increased performance for automation and improved interpretability of algorithms.

Maya Codical Glyph Segmentation: A Crowdsourcing Approach

This paper focuses on the crowd-annotation of an ancient Maya glyph dataset derived from the three ancient codices that survived up to date. More precisely, nonexpert annotators are asked to segment glyph-blocks into their constituent glyph entities. As a means of supervision, available glyph variants are provided to the annotators during the crowdsourcing task. Compared to object recognition in natural images or handwriting transcription tasks, designing an engaging task and dealing with crowd behavior is challenging in our case. This challenge originates from the inherent complexity of Maya writing and an incomplete understanding of the signs and semantics in the existing catalogs. We elaborate on the evolution of the crowdsourcing task design, and discuss the choices for providing supervision during the task. We analyze the distributions of similarity and task difficulty scores, and the segmentation performance of the crowd. A unique dataset of over 9000 Maya glyphs from 291 categories individually segmented from the three codices was created and will be made publicly available thanks to this process. This dataset lends itself to automatic glyph classification tasks. We provide baseline methods for glyph classification using traditional shape descriptors and convolutional neural networks.

Analyzing and visualizing ancient Maya hieroglyphics using shape: From computer vision to Digital Humanities

Maya hieroglyphic analysis requires epigraphers to spend a significant amount of time browsing existing catalogs to identify individual glyphs. Automatic Maya glyph analysis provides an efficient way to assist scholars’ daily work. We introduce the Histogram of Orientation Shape Context (HOOSC) shape descriptor to the Digital Humanities community. We discuss key issues for practitioners and study the effect that certain parameters have on the performance of the descriptor. Different HOOSC parameters are tested in an automatic ancient Maya hieroglyph retrieval system with two different settings, namely, when shape alone is considered and when glyph co-occurrence information is incorporated. Additionally, we developed a graph-based glyph visualization interface to facilitate efficient exploration and analysis of hieroglyphs. Specifically, a force-directed graph prototype is applied to visualize Maya glyphs based on their visual similarity. Each node in the graph represents a glyph image; the width of an edge indicates the visual similarity between the two according glyphs. The HOOSC descriptor is used to represent glyph shape, based on which pairwise glyph similarity scores are computed. To evaluate our tool, we designed evaluation tasks and questionnaires for two separate user groups, namely, a general public user group and an epigrapher scholar group. Evaluation results and feedback from both groups show that our tool provides intuitive access to explore and discover the Maya hieroglyphic writing, and could potentially facilitate epigraphy work. The positive evaluation results and feedback further hint the practical value of the HOOSC descriptor.

Extracting Maya Glyphs from Degraded Ancient Documents via Image Segmentation

We present a system for automatically extracting hieroglyph strokes from images of degraded ancient Maya codices. Our system adopts a region-based image segmentation framework. Multi-resolution super-pixels are first extracted to represent each image. A Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is used to label each super-pixel region with a probability to belong to foreground glyph strokes. Pixelwise probability maps from multiple super-pixel resolution scales are then aggregated to cope with various stroke widths and background noise. A fully connected Conditional Random Field model is then applied to improve the labeling consistency. Segmentation results show that our system preserves delicate local details of the historic Maya glyphs with various stroke widths and also reduces background noise. As an application, we conduct retrieval experiments using the extracted binary images. Experimental results show that our automatically extracted glyph strokes achieve comparable retrieval results to those obtained using glyphs manually segmented by epigraphers in our team.

Evaluating Shape Representations for Maya Glyph Classification

Shape representations are critical for visual analysis of cultural heritage materials. This article studies two types of shape representations in a bag-of-words-based pipeline to recognize Maya glyphs. The first is a knowledge-driven Histogram of Orientation Shape Context (HOOSC) representation, and the second is a data-driven representation obtained by applying an unsupervised Sparse Autoencoder (SA). In addition to the glyph data, the generalization ability of the descriptors is investigated on a larger-scale sketch dataset. The contributions of this article are four-fold: (1) the evaluation of the performance of a data-driven auto-encoder approach for shape representation; (2) a comparative study of hand-designed HOOSC and data-driven SA; (3) an experimental protocol to assess the effect of the different parameters of both representations; and (4) bridging humanities and computer vision/machine learning for Maya studies, specifically for visual analysis of glyphs. From our experiments, the data-driven representation performs overall in par with the hand-designed representation for similar locality sizes on which the descriptor is computed. We also observe that a larger number of hidden units, the use of average pooling, and a larger training data size in the SA representation all improved the descriptor performance. Additionally, the characteristics of the data and stroke size play an important role in the learned representation.

SPECIAL SECTION: NEW DIALOGUES ABOUT ANCIENT MAYA

Most people think of Maya civilisation, if they do at all, while on vacation. A daytrip from a beach takes them to ruins nearby, crowded with tourists in correct holiday gear. In the recent past, others might have grown anxious about the portentous significance of the year 2012. Maya glyphs, so the hucksters affirmed, predicted a cascade of dire events, not one of which (predictably) has come to pass. Then there are those living in Mayaland itself, an area embracing parts of Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and all of Belize. Their personal identities stem in part from a sense of direct inheritance, extending to rights of ownership and interpretation.

Listening in the Pakal controversy: a matter of care in Ancient Maya studies.

This article explores the fraught historical politics of a 20th-century controversy over a Classic Maya king. The controversy ostensibly concerned the age at death of a ruler discovered in 1952 in an elaborate sarcophagus at the Mexican site of Palenque. Combining osteological and epigraphic techniques, Mexican scholars estimated that the ruler died at about 40 or 50years of age. Two decades later, an emerging collective of US hieroglyph experts claimed to have determined the grammatical structure of Maya glyphs for the first time and reevaluated the sarcophagus inscriptions. They concluded that the king, given the name 'Pakal', lived a remarkably long life of 80years (603-683 CE). This reading sparked a controversy that would persist until 1999. At stake was not just how to tell the story of an ancient Maya lord, but who could tell it, with what evidence, and with what degree of certainty. The inclination of some Mexican archaeologists to adopt nationalist and Marxist orientations came into palpable tension with foreign scholars' liberal, universalist knowledge practices. To address this problem, I rethink Pakal's material mediation through bones and inscriptions as a 'matter of concern' (Bruno Latour) and 'matter of care' (Maria Puig de la Bellacasa). I show how these concepts facilitate the reconsideration of contradictory historical propositions as potential sites of coexistence among actors temporarily ill equipped to listen to each other's claims. Ultimately, I present 'listening' as a technique of cosmopolitical care that complements the extensive emphasis on speech and spokespersonship in Latourian cosmopolitics.

Humans: Apocalypse not written in stone: Newfound Maya glyphs don't treat 2012 as an end year

Humans: Apocalypse not written in stone: Newfound Maya glyphs don't treat 2012 as an end year

The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet (review)

Reviewed by: The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet Joshua T. Katz The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet. By Amalia E. Gnanadesikan. (The language library.) Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Pp. xii, 310 (+ 8 pages of plates). ISBN 9781405154079. $38.95. According to some, the world will come to an end on or around December 21, 2012, with the close of the thirteenth baktun of the current Mayan age. In The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet, an engaging book that combines accuracy and readability better than any other work on orthographic practices across time and space, Amalia E. Gnanadesikan concurs with the usual view that the complex calendrical system of the Maya's predecessors, the Olmec, was 'the intellectual stimulus' (80) for the development of writing in Mesoamerica, which she discusses in Ch. 5, 'Maya glyphs: Calendars of kings'. G takes the reader from 'The first IT revolution' (Ch. 1)—the idea of writing, which she calls 'a virtual necessity to the societies anthropologists call CIVILIZATIONS' (1)1—to 'the ultimate triumph of the written word' (272) enabled by the World Wide Web (Ch. 14, 'The alphabet meets the machine'), along the way giving accessible accounts of the origins and spread of cuneiform, katakana, and much more. As to what comes next, in her concluding words, 'If handwriting ushered in civilization, and print ushered in modernity, it remains to be seen what hypertext will do for us' (272)—provided, of course, that we make it to 2013. The fourteen compact chapters sparkle with the author's enthusiasm for her subject, which she credits in the preface to a friend who showed her the wondrous simplicity of the Korean writing system, han'gul, when she was a sophomore in college (xi). No linguist can resist han'gul—'the true paragon of scripts' (191; cf. p. 201), invented in the mid-fifteenth century—and it is perhaps not surprising that Ch. 11, 'King Sejong's one-man renaissance',2 is especially fine.3 Today nearly every Korean is literate, 'proving, in North Korea, that a high literacy rate is no guarantee of economic success' (207). Wry comments of this kind and G's evident delight in the offbeat give this book much of its charm and make it easy to recommend not just for undergraduate classes but also as bedside reading [End Page 640] for professionals and the general public alike. It is hard to resist such phrases as '[t]he alphabet is a monument to human stupidity and hidebound conservatism' (143) and 'the fifth century BC Athenian unpopularity contest known as OSTRACISM' (217), not to mention the description of Italian as 'the Latin that stayed home' (236). And who could not enjoy learning, or being reminded, of King Ibrahim Njoya, the inventor of a now all-but-dead orthographic system for the Bamum people of Cameroon, over whom he ruled from the 1880s to the 1930s (5-10, also 133); of the Hanunóo of the Philippines, who typically write their Brahmi-derived script from bottom to top (180); or of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, said to be the first typed manuscript submitted to a publisher (265)? It would be wrong of me to give the impression that G is primarily in the business of telling tales. Sometimes her stories are hokey: for example, Ch. 12, 'Greek serendipity', which begins with the sentence 'The Greeks of the ninth century BC were barbarians, a situation for which we should all be grateful' (208) and throughout thumps the 'barbarian' theme, goes on to tell what even G dubs a 'fanciful tale' (214) about how a Greek created the voweled alphabet under the tutelage of his consonantal script-employing friend the Phoenician (209-14). For the most part, however, she successfully weaves together linguistics and history, allowing the two areas of inquiry to illuminate each other.4 Although she wears her linguistic learning more lightly than the authors of competing books, she regularly finds attractive ways to explain difficult concepts. I may assign The writing revolution as the principal textbook the next time I teach 'Writing systems of the world' (a freshman seminar with no prerequisites) and will in...

IDENTIFYING A FORGED MAYA MANUSCRIPT IN UNESCO'S WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY

AbstractAmong the original holdings of the recently opened World Digital Library was a Spanish manuscript on the Maya that supposedly dates to 1548 (initially available athttp://www.wdl.org/en/item/2961). It was given the titleEl modo de cómo hacían la pintura los indígenas(“How the Indians Made Their Paintings”) and contained an explanation of Maya culture accompanied by drawings of Maya glyphs and deities. Detailed analysis shows that thePinturamanuscript is a fake that belongs to the Canek group of forged manuscripts. It is written in the same hand as the Canek forgeries and shares the same stylistic characteristics with this group. Its drawings copy illustrations from the third English or the second Spanish edition of Sylvanus Morley'sThe Ancient Maya, and from theMadrid Codex. The World Digital Library aims to make significant primary materials from all UNESCO member countries available on the Internet. Forgeries like thePinturamanuscript undermine the trustworthiness and eminence of this project. While thePinturamanuscript was removed from the World Digital Library in August 2009, researchers may find useful the holistic approach that allowed identifying it as a forgery. A historical document is here examined from six angles. What are its physical makeup, its penmanship, and its linguistic properties? Authentic documents should have a traceable history of documentation (here termed a “pedigree”) and their content should be consistent with well-established sources and with culture- and time-specific conventions.

Analyzing Ancient Maya Glyph Collections with Contextual Shape Descriptors

This paper presents an original approach for shape-based analysis of ancient Maya hieroglyphs based on an interdisciplinary collaboration between computer vision and archeology. Our work is guided by realistic needs of archaeologists and scholars who critically need support for search and retrieval tasks in large Maya imagery collections. Our paper has three main contributions. First, we introduce an overview of our interdisciplinary approach towards the improvement of the documentation, analysis, and preservation of Maya pictographic data. Second, we present an objective evaluation of the performance of two state-of-the-art shape-based contextual descriptors (Shape Context and Generalized Shape Context) in retrieval tasks, using two datasets of syllabic Maya glyphs. Based on the identification of their limitations, we propose a new shape descriptor named Histogram of Orientation Shape Context (HOOSC), which is more robust and suitable for description of Maya hieroglyphs. Third, we present what to our knowledge constitutes the first automatic analysis of visual variability of syllabic glyphs along historical periods and across geographic regions of the ancient Maya world via the HOOSC descriptor. Overall, our approach is promising, as it improves performance on the retrieval task, has been successfully validated under an epigraphic viewpoint, and has the potential of offering both novel insights in archeology and practical solutions for real daily scholar needs.

The Fiery pool: the Maya and the mythic sea

Maya art and hieroglyphs constitute one of the world's most fascinating, visually striking, and complex systems of expression. Most scholarly interpretations of Maya art and culture have emphasized that this ancient civilization was oriented toward inland centers and preoccupied with the blood of royal lineage and ritual sacrifice. Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries and developments in deciphering Maya glyphs, this groundbreaking volume presents a revisionist reading that shifts the emphasis of interpretation to the mythic power of the sea as the basis of a larger, deeper cultural narrative and history for the Maya. Surrounded by the sea in all directions, the Maya viewed water as a source of both life and danger. Through the artworks presented-including acknowledged masterpieces and many never before exhibited in the United States-readers will gain a new appreciation for water's influence on Maya cosmology, its role in their interpretation of the supernatural, as well as its impact on Maya cross-cultural contacts, trading practices, and power dynamics. Essays by prominent scholars provide an interdisciplinary context for understanding Maya art as well as new interpretations of traditional iconography and symbolism. Accompanying a monumental exhibition comprising almost 100 artworks ranging from carved stone monuments to delicate jade sculptures, this compelling, richly illustrated publication will fundamentally transform the interpretation of Maya art.

THE TEOTIHUACAN BALLGAME AND THE BEGINNING OF TIME

This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the Tepantitla murals long known as the Tlalocan. Taking into account the numerous representations of different kinds of ballgames on these walls, along with the instances of the Maya glyph forpu,puorpu[h], or “Place of the Reeds” (i.e. Tollan), this paper argues that this mural represents Teotihuacan as prototypical civilized city associated with the beginning of time and the calendar. Further evidence is provided by the images of “Scattering Priests” in the adjacent room, all of whom wear crocodilian headdresses associated with Cipactli, the first day of the central Mexican calendar. In both rooms, images of Tlaloc with hallucinogenic water-lily buds in his mouth reflect associations with the sun, the calendar, and the underworld. The murals of Tepantitla can be interpreted as a coherent program representing the central role of the ballgame in establishing Teotihuacan as Tollan, the place where time began.

Genetics and the History of Latin America

Genetics and the History of Latin America

Alfred Maudslay and the Maya

This is the first biography written about Alfred Maudslay (1850–1931), who was inspired to follow John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood in the next generation of exploration in the Maya world. The biographer and his subject seem a perfect match, since both men made major contributions to making possible the recent decipherment of the Maya glyphs. Even the two men’s lives have parallels: they are both British, both became involved with Maya studies in their thirties, and both received institutional support for their work only later in their careers. Ian Graham’s interest in Alfred Maudslay led him to locate a niece, who made many surviving papers and memorabilia available to him. On a solid documentary base of letters, journals, and publications by Maudslay, Graham wrote this biography years later, when his career allowed the time.Graham begins with the Maudslay family’s rise to wealth with inventions in machine engineering. Alfred initially intended a career in medicine, but health problems caused him to seek a warmer climate. He first visited Guatemala because of an interest in ornithology; while working in the Colonial Service in Fiji, he became interested in ethnography. In 1880 he decided to resign from the Colonial Service and to study antiquities in Guatemala. Unfortunately, no documents from 1880 survive to show this change of direction. Between 1881 and 1894, Maudslay undertook expeditions to major Maya sites, including Tikal and Palenque, at this own expense. Workers cleared jungle and rubble from monuments, which were then preserved by Maudslay in photographs, paper and plaster molds, and subsequent drawings. Graham’s vivid account of these expeditions is the most fascinating part of the book. In his early forties, Maudslay married the granddaughter of New York founding father Gouverneur Morris, whose life and career Graham profiles. After living in Mexico, the Maudslays returned to live in England, where they spent busy years writing, translating, and finding a museum to hold Maudslay’s enormous collection of sculpture, molds, and casts. The British Museum found the space.Graham is complimentary, characterizing Maudslay as “the type of the true English gentleman” (p. 270). Graham characterizes criticism of him by one of his few critics, Mexican archeologist Leopoldo Batres, as motivated by jealousy. Batres opposed giving Maudslay permission to work in Oaxaca and accused the Englishman of destroying temples in order to ship sculptured lintels to England (p. 217). Later, Maudslay criticized Batres for removing the facing of a pyramid at Teoti-huacán and taking carvings from their site that, Maudslay thought, were not in any danger of damage (p. 252). Graham points out a number of instances when Maudslay’s views were validated by recent Maya studies. Most interesting among these is Maudslay’s opposition to those who attributed the achievements of the Classic Maya to cultural diffusion from the Old World.This handsome volume includes 48 pages of plates, primarily photographs taken by Maudslay. It is a readable book with frequent touches of wit from both Maudslay and Graham. Readers will not need advanced knowledge of archaeology or the Maya; the text is clear even when things such as the Maya calendar are presented. Although the biography does give a history of the development of archaeology, and Maya archaeology in particular, it does not focus on the history of Guatemala and Mexico in the late nineteenth century. Historians will find interesting testimony by Maudslay about the era, however—notably, the problem of securing workers. Maudslay did not leave private diaries, and the biography of this British gentleman scholar is primarily his public, professional life. A wide audience of general readers, students, and experts should enjoy Alfred Maudslay and the Maya.

Review of Coe & Van Stone (2001): Reading the Maya glyphs

Review of Coe & Van Stone (2001): Reading the Maya glyphs

Dictionary of Maya hieroglyphs

This authoritative work is the first visual dictionary of Maya glyphs published since the script's complete deciphering, offering a much-needed, comprehensive catalogue of 1100 secured glyphs. Each entry includes the illustrated glyph, its phonetic transcription, Mayan equivalent, part of speech, and meaning. About the Author John Montgomery is an illustrator, epigrapher, writer, and PhD candidate in the field of Pre-Columbian Art at the University of New Mexico. He also teaches art history at the South-western Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque. A long and varied experience in Central America first inspired his interest in the ancient Maya. His glyphic illustrations based on a lifetime of involvement with Maya glyph decipherment. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Reading the Maya glyphs

Reading the Maya glyphs