- Monday, November 18, 2024 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm
Class of 1978 Pavilion, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections on the 6th floor of the University of Pennsylvania's Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
We welcome Simon Martin (Penn Museum), for a talk titled “Getting Stones to Speak: The Decipherment of Maya Script and What It Has to Tell Us.”
Dr. Martin writes:
Ancient Maya inscriptions, which appear on numerous stone monuments as well as more portable items of clay, shell, bone, and stucco, long presented a seemingly irresolvable puzzle. But insights gained from data in Spanish colonial documents, original bark paper books carried away to Europe in the sixteenth century, and, most of all, accurate renderings of the script from the field eventually provided the necessary keys. Beginning in the 1990s, the decipherment of individual signs came rapidly, and the underlying language of the inscriptions became clear. The result was an explosion of new evidence and answers to a great many questions about this remarkable ancient American culture. This talk describes both the process of getting mute stones to speak and the transformative impact of such research on the archaeology, anthropology, art history, and linguistics of the region.
Simon Martin gained his PhD in Archaeology at University College London and is currently an Associate Curator and Keeper at Penn Museum and Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a political anthropologist and specialist in Maya hieroglyphic writing, with a particular interest in the history, politics, and religious beliefs of the Classic Period (150–900 CE). He has numerous publications to his name and his most recent book, Ancient Maya Politics (Cambridge University Press), won major prizes from the Association of American Publishers and the American Historical Association.