Research Contribution 15, The Paris Codex Index, is a nearly 300-page document that organizes the 203 unique glyphs from the Paris Codex into an easy-to-reference format. This resource, assembled by Clio Reichart and Bruce Love, should prove useful to Maya epigraphers for years to come.
-Bruce Love and Meghan Rubenstein
Research Contribution 15: The Paris Codex Index, Clio Reichart and Bruce Love
With the help of Bernie Mittelstaedt, I photographed the monuments of La Florida over two nights on April 9-10, 2019. Joanne Baron, considered today’s expert on the site and its monuments, had already been working at the site for some time, but my own work there was not part of her project. I had contacted her about my intentions, and she gave me the green light. However, any arrangements to photograph would have to be made by me and Bernie after we arrived there.
We had just come from La Libertad where, three years prior, again thanks to Bernie’s incredible diplomatic skills, we had gotten permission to photograph pieces in the municipality (Corpus Volume 7: Itzimte Stelae at La Libertad, Petén, Guatemala). I returned this year, 2019, to present La Libertad alcalde Benjamin Ipiña printed photographs of the monuments suitable for hanging. He was very appreciative. When Bernie mentioned our intention to go to the site of La Florida in the town of El Naranjo, the alcalde made a call for us and paved the way.
Arriving in El Naranjo around midday we went first to see the alcalde, to tell him our intentions and to get his blessings. Later in the evening, Bernie arranged for us to enter the military base where many of the monuments were located. The site itself is scattered throughout the town and the military base, with one of the main archaeological plazas now serving as a soccer field, a soccer field with monuments on the edges.
Now, some four years later, I am happy to present to you, our readers, this collection of photographs.
-Bruce Love
Corpus Volume 14: Monuments from La Florida Namaan, Petén, Guatemala
Dear Readers,
With this corpus volume, we at Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies (CtMS) begin a new practice of publishing photographs of monuments without accompanying drawings. Up to now, all of our Corpus Volumes present photographs and drawings side-by-side, following the tradition established by the great Ian Graham in his Peabody Museum corpus volumes. But the time it takes to produce good, careful drawings has held up publication of important volumes of stone monuments that would be welcome contributions to the field. That, of course, is our mission at CtMS: publish and make accessible to our worldwide body of researchers valuable data ripe for analysis and interpretation.
Back in 2008, I began photographing monuments using a particular technique, taught to me by Jorge Pérez de Lara, that uses a powerful, professional-grade flash unit in the dark, held by an assistant some meters away from the object at a steep, raking angle, synced to the camera. The camera can then be hand-held because the flash freezes any hand motion. This eliminates the need for generators and tripods, allowing for the proper recordation of multiple monuments per evening.
As I grew in experience, I began also creating drawing aids for each monument. These drawing aids are made by coming in close with the camera, still hand-held, and capturing single glyph blocks or groups of glyph blocks while the assistant turns down the power of the flash and comes in close, like eighteen inches close, and goes around the glyph block, one click at a time, capturing each glyph with up to a dozen different light angles.
Then, back at home, I develop the “portrait” shots, the straight-on views of the entire monument with the raking light, using both Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, to produce the final portrait. Then whoever makes the drawings of the glyphs can use the drawing aids to make drawings overlying the portraits.
I have been photographing monuments now over multiple field seasons, my latest being 2022 and my next being 2025. I have many sites and museum collections “in the can,” and I am collecting volumes of photographs far quicker than drawings can be produced, so I reached out to a number of my colleagues and asked what they thought about the idea of publishing photographs without drawings, and the response was unanimous: do it!
Just as a teaser, let me say I have complete corpora of the known inscriptions from Chichen Itza; Uxmal; the Lithic Museum at Tikal; the entire country of Belize (except for pieces in U.S. Museums that I am planning to get soon), including Pusilha in the British Museum; the monuments of La Florida Namaan; the monuments of Takalik Abaj; the collection of fragments from Naranjo and the whole stelae of Naranjo at the municipio in Melchor de Mencos; the captives of Dzibanche; Moral Reforma Stela 1 and 2 at the Pellicer Museum in Villahermosa; and Stela 13 and 31 at Yaxha. Pending permissions, all these monuments are in line to be published. Furthermore, according to Milan Kováč, the entire corpus of Uaxactun is scheduled to be released shortly in a separate publication.
We also plan to make the drawing aids for each monument available through links to online storage, so that you, our subscribers, can make your own drawings.
This volume on Oxpemul, Campeche (without drawing aids, unfortunately, because I wasn’t making drawing aids in those earliest days of my photographic efforts), marks the first in a series of corpora of monuments to be published without accompanying drawings. May the information on these stones spur new discoveries and interpretations of Maya history.
-Bruce Love
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
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
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.
-Bruce Love and Meghan Rubenstein
We end 2021 and begin 2022 with an exciting new Research Contribution: the first volume of La Colección del Museo Dr. Juan Antonio Valdes, Uaxactún, Guatemala, which provides photo documentation and data for nearly half of the almost 600 Maya objects in the Dr. Juan Antonio Valdes Museum. David Lebrun and Rosie Guthrie have created a film clip for the blog to share the story of the museum’s founder and caretaker, Neria Herrera, which we hope you will enjoy as well.
-Bruce Love and Meghan Rubenstein
The most recent contribution is a catalog of non-Maya glyphs from the site of Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Mexico. It is the second iteration of a project began by Bruce in 2010, with the assistance of the late Peter Schmidt. This updated version, like the original, is offered without interpretation so that it can be of use to a range of researchers. We hope the digital format will allow for wide distribution and easy navigation of this unusual body of hieroglyphs.
-Bruce Love and Meghan Rubenstein
Dear readers,
Shortly after publishing Research Contribution 9, follower and supporter Karl-Herbert Mayer brought to our attention that Teobert Maler had visited Ichmul and photographed Panel 1 and Panel 2 in the late 19th and/or early 20 century, quite some time earlier than Sylvanus Morley. Thanks to Karl’s lead, and with Bill Ringle’s help, Maler’s photographs of the Ichmul panels have been found and are, in fact, available to download at https://digital.iai.spk-berlin.de/viewer/image/1049600878/1/LOG_0003/. Greg Smith’s revised Research Contribution 9 is now posted in place of the original.
Bruce Love and Meghan Rubenstein, Publishers
Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies
Research Contribution 9: The History of the Ichmul de Morley Ballplayer Panels, by J. Gregory Smith
Research Contribution 9 and Corpus Volume 9 are here published simultaneously; both are about the carved stone panels known as Ichmul de Morley Panels 1 and 2. The Research Contribution, by Gregory Smith, details the early history of the discovery of the panels by Sylvanus Morley and their subsequent documentation, while the Corpus Volume presents recent photographs and drawings of them by Bruce Love.
Corpus Volume 9: Ichmul de Morley, Yucatán, Mexico
Research Contribution 9: The History of the Ichmul de Morley Ballplayer Panels, by J. Gregory Smith
Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies 