From History to Cultural Diversity: The Changing Roles of the Maya Script as Archaeological Data

Abstract

In recent decades, the value of hieroglyphic texts to Maya archaeology has become increasingly clear. Texts provide precise chronologies and insights into the Maya worldview. They also link artifacts to individual agents and social categories and help us to understand the roles and interactions of historical individuals. Historical texts engage with other archaeological datasets in specific ways, suggesting comparative interpretations of events in the past. Even though the Maya script remains incompletely deciphered, linguistic variation within the script offers a way to explore ethno-linguistic diversity among the ancient Maya. Cultural diversity can also be explored through examination of formal aspects of the script from the perspective of paleography and graphemics in general, both of which provide evidence of scribal interactions and script evolution. Digital technologies are particularly valuable for visualizing and encoding texts with relation to time, space, and other archaeological datasets and, when combined with a social networks perspective, can be used to map other dimensions of sociocultural diversity in the Maya world.