Mayanist

They assumed the glyphs were purely symbolic, decorative, perhaps calendrical, but not phonetic, not capable of recording spoken language.

This assumption held for decades, reinforced by some of the most prominent Mayanists of the early 20th century, who built entire careers on the idea that Maya glyphs were ideographic rather than linguistic.

The breakthrough came from an unlikely source.

Yuri Knorosov was a Soviet epigrapher who had never visited a Maya site.

Neil has never been to Guatemala before and is not a Mayan specialist.

So to help find Site Q, he's enlisted the help of Mayanist Simone Clifford Yeager and Guatemalan jungle guide Bernie Mittelstadt.

The team has various leads to follow.

The first is hidden in the catalog of one of the art galleries that sold the Site Q panels.

And at that point, I was living in Austin, Texas, and I was studying with a famous iconographer named Kent Riley.

And Kent had gone to school with Linda Shealy, who's also a really famous Mayanist who wrote some of the more accessible books about the Maya.

Today, they're a little bit out of date because she was writing in the 80s and 90s, but still very brilliant books.

And so he recommended that I meet with another, one of his peers, who was Dr. Ed Barnhart, and Ed and I had coffee and we enjoyed each other, but we just kind of went our separate ways and didn't really stay super close cut until I was here in Mexico.

If you go through the archives of Earth HHS, you can see he's written a number of books.

One of his most famous, which is used by colleges and universities, Mayanist, is Ancient Maya Technology.

And then he wrote another book on cotton, chocolate, and maya cultivate cultivation that's not the title uh i'll give it to you some other time but what he discovered is they were horticulturists they grew and developed vegetables and fruits and you know my whole thing is that i don't believe they necessarily came from the bering strait which is asia and in my research and this is what's so amazing about ai i said i wrote a prompt i said trace the earliest development of fruits and vegetables in the Mayan community and locate archaeological records and research that ties this into the Mayan people.

Well, what comes back is a number of very, very detailed research papers by Mayan archaeologists, and some of these are the 1950s, 1960s before I was born.

Hey, this is Cliff, your host of Earth Agents.

And right now, I'm having a little bit of a dilemma.

And I think, and it may be, that when I talk to friends like Ed Barnhart or Richard Hansen or whoever else I have on the program who are Mayanist, maybe they're not getting the data that I'm getting.

And I'm beginning to think it's true.

I, you know, went to University of Texas at Austin, which is also a great place to go to school and be from, and to go to, and studied art history and archaeology.

I doubled majored in Art history, archaeology, some people don't know this, I was actually a Mayanist.

I was on a couple sites down in Central America, which naturally led me to being a SaaS software CEO.

All the skill sets that are defined.

He is killed through deception by the hero twins and associated with burial under a mountain.

Linguists and Mayanists have argued that the name derives from Nahuatl Cipactli or from a shared Mesoamerican crocodilian complex.

The character is a narrative giant rather than the earth's body itself, but the association with landforms belongs to the same set of ideas.

20th century highland Maya tradition retains a demon called Cipac, a hill near Rabinal, Guatemala, elongated and compared locally to a crocodile, is named Sepak and is sometimes identified with the buried figure.

And I, I gotta say, I'm really enjoying the final phases of this work that I'm doing on this book, and I've been just simply blown away by the research, the archeological record of the Maya.

And I was astounded at how many, uh, people are concentrating on Mayan studies or Mayanists.

And so you go to your s- you go to school, you be- you get an anthropology degree, and then you sign up and get your fields- field work.

I, I can't remember how many hours it is.

Hey, I am working right now on a cosmology section of this book.

And I have discovered, and it's been known by a certain type of archaeologist or a Mayanist, that the Maya... we're very fixated on various planets.

And we know about the Dresden Codex because it has this Venus chart in it.

But there's also the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, the Maya Codex of Mexico, and the Pupil Vu, and the books of Chilam Bam, all have something to say about the importance of cosmology in the Maya world.