Automated Analysis of Mayan Inscriptions - British Computer Society Lecture at Surrey

Wednesday 27 May 2009

Automated Analysis of Mayan Inscriptions

Alex Bennett

The Maya are an indigenous culture spread across southern Mexico, the Yucatan, Guatemala and Belize, thriving in one form or another from around 1000BC up to the Spanish Conquest in the mid-16th century. They organised themselves into semi-autonomous city states, within a constantly shifting hierarchy of alliances and political domination. Much of what's known about Maya internal and international politics comes from translating monumental inscriptions, written in a glyph-based script, where an individual glyph sign can either represent a syllable, a collection of syllables, a whole word or a concept. This means there may be anything up to seven or eight different ways of representing the same sign, without worrying about synonyms, minor style variation or anything grammatically complex. Right now, prevailing theory says that the choice of sign is dictated purely by artistic conventions: what fits most neatly into the space and looks most attractive. My theory is that given the competitive (and often downright belligerent) nature of Maya politics and the cultural importance of writing, the picture is more complex and that the use of one version of a sign over another may be at least partially dictated by the prevailing political climate. For example, one city state may have a preferred form which it imposes on other states it can claim dominance over; a conquered state may also have its scribes replaced by those loyal to its conqueror. To test this theory, and to provide a research tool for other Maya scholars, I'm designing a suite of tools to identify, analyse, query and store a range of data on Mayan inscriptions. The whole suite is called 'Dynamite' - Dynamic Analysis, Interpretation and Evaluation.