Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies

A Variant of the Codical T501 HA’ Logogram

Published on May 27, 2023 by Contributions to Mesoamerican Research

This current Research Contribution came about as a sidebar to a bigger, ongoing project: “A Comprehensive Commentary on the Dresden Codex.” Our readers may be familiar with Uguku Usdi (2013; 2017) who is in the unique situation among Maya scholars of being a long-term prisoner in the State of California federal prison system.

George Stuart introduced me to Uguku some seventeen years ago and we have been corresponding and collaborating on many things, usually Maya codex related, ever since. Around two years ago we embarked on the ambitious project of writing a new glyph-by-glyph, page-by-page commentary on the Dresden Codex, a much-needed (we feel) update to previously published commentaries.

Uguku for years has spearheaded the In Lak’ech Study Group of Mesoamerican enthusiasts inside the prison, whose membership has waxed and waned depending on people coming in and going out of prison, and he was recently joined by a newer inmate named Clio Renata Reichart Ywahoo (she is transgender) who is, according to Uguku, a genius with a learning curve that is “so steep it is scary.”

Clio, in her self-introduction to me, says she has retained her childhood fascination with ancient history into her adult life (she is currently twenty-eight), so Uguku and I put her to work on the Comprehensive Commentary creating an index of every glyph in the Dresden Codex. For example, Glyph T757 has the following entry:

Macri and Vail: AP9
Thompson: T757
Zimmermann: Z708

D2a A1; D3a E2; D4b V5; D8a A3; D8c F1; D9a D2; D10a B3; D10b D2; D11b B2; D22c F3; D47a F3; D47c E2; D69a A3; D74 B2; D29b C2; D36a C2; D39b A1

Total occurrences: 17

In the process of compiling the index, Reichart came across a glyph she felt was misidentified in the two most recently published complete commentaries on the Dresden Codex, Schele and Grube (1997) and Velásquez García (2016; 2017). As a newcomer to the field, she needed help writing up her findings, which Uguku provided, and I did some light final editing.

We feel this discovery is worthy of publication on two fronts: (1) it presents a new allograph, heretofore not recognized, of a common glyph in the Dresden Codex; and (2) it points out the untapped genius hidden away in our state prisons, where opportunities to do research and to publish are essentially non-existent. I am proud to offer Ms. Reichart this conduit to present her discovery to the broader academic world of Mesoamericanists.

Bruce Love (May 24, 2023)
Juniper Hills, California

Schele, Linda and Nikolai Grube
1997 Notebook for the XXIst Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, March 8-9, 1997, Part II The Dresden Codex. University of Texas, Austin, Department of Art and Art History, the College of Fine Arts, and the Institute of Latin American Studies, Austin.

Uguku Usdi
2013 The Rise of Chak Ek’; Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing, No. 60. Barnardsville: Boundary End Archaeology Research Center.

2017 Where are we today in the Dresden Codex Venus Table? Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies, October 16, 2017. https://brucelove.com/research/contribution_001/

Velásquez García, Erik
2016 Códice de Dresde: Parte 1, Edición facsimilar. Arqueología Mexicana Edición Especial núm. 67.

2017 Códice de Dresde: Parte 2, Edición facsimilar. Arqueología Mexicana, Edición Especial núm. 72.

Research Contribution 14: A Variant of the Codical T501 HA’ Logogram, Clio Reichart and Uguku Usdi

The Neria Collection, Uaxactún, Guatemala: Volume 2

Published on March 1, 2023 by Contributions to Mesoamerican Research

In March, 2022, almost three years after photographing the first half of the Neria ceramic collection (see: Research Contribution 11: La Colección del Museo Dr. Juan Antonio Valdes, Vol. 1, Bruce Love and Meghan Rubenstein), I returned to El Chiclero, Neria and Tono’s rustic tourist lodgings in Uaxactun, to shoot the second half of her stunning collection. If you missed the introduction to Volume I, published in 2021, we repeat part of it here:

“The story behind her collection is fascinating, and well-told in Night Fire Film’s Out of the Maya Tombs (available at https://nightfirefilms.org/films/). The producers at Night Fire Films, David Lebrun and Rosie Guthrie, made a clip especially for this blog to introduce our readers to the museum and its founder. You may see the film clip by clicking here https://vimeo.com/589143884.”

-Bruce Love

Research Contribution 13: La Colección del Museo Dr. Juan Antonio Valdes, Vol. 2, Bruce Love and Meghan Rubenstein

A Catalog of Non-Maya Glyphs at Chichen Itza: Second Edition

Published on November 28, 2022 by Contributions to Mesoamerican Research

The second edition of A Catalog of Non-Maya Glyphs at Chichen Itza includes twenty-two glyphs from the Northwest Colonnade that were inadvertently omitted from the first edition and an additional eleven glyphs from the Caracoles Mesa, recently discovered by site archaeologists José Francisco Osorio and Francisco Pérez in the Temple of the Snails (Caracoles) building in the Initial Series Group.

As with the previous version shared in June 2021, this catalog is offered without interpretation with the focus on the data themselves. We hope the updated catalog, presented in the same digital format, will allow for wide distribution and easy navigation of these hieroglyphs.