concerning both of the two most important issues involving Maya writing. The first concerned the content of the thousands of surviving Maya carved stone monuments: Thompson believed that they were carved to commemorate the passage of time and that it would have been sacrilegious for any Maya to glorify individual achievements. This view was dramatically overturned in 1960 when tatiana proskouriakoff showed that the Maya monuments do indeed have historical content; to his credit, Thompson immediately and graciously accepted Proskouriakoff’s arguments.

The second issue concerned the nature of the script. Thompson never wavered from his deeply held conviction that Maya hieroglyphic writing was a logographic system (in which signs represent entire words), but it has now been convincingly demonstrated that the script is a “mixed” one, containing both logographs and syllabic signs. Even though Thompson, were he alive today, might not approve of the methods of decipherment, he would be gratified to know that over 90 percent of Maya hieroglyphs have now been deciphered.

Thompson made many great contributions in the advancement of our understanding of the Maya culture. The correlation between Maya and Christian calendars is essentially the one proposed by him in the 1920s, he published a catalog of Maya hieroglyphs that is still widely used today, and one of his last publications was a detailed study of the most famous surviving Maya book, the Dresden Codex.

Peter Mathews

See also

Belize; Guatemala; Maya Epigraphy; Mesoamerica

References

Thompson, J. Eric S. 1994. Maya Archaeologist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Thomsen, Christian Jürgensen

(1788–1865)

Born in Copenhagen the son of a wealthy businessman, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen worked in the family business while pursuing his antiquarian interests part-time. He began to collect coins and antiquities and in 1816 was appointed national antiquary and secretary of the Antiquaries Commission. As such, he began to expand and rearrange the collections of the Museum of National Antiquities in Copenhagen. To do this work Thomsen had to devise a chronology or method of explanation for the display of archaeological artifacts and material, and he chose the three-age system of stone, bronze, and iron to organize them and make them coherent. This chronology was put into place in the museum between 1818 and 1825 and appeared in print in the museum’s guidebook (Guide to Northern Antiquities) eleven years later.

Thomsen was not the first to devise the three-age system, but he was the first archaeologist to formulate, define, and illustrate it with archaeological materials and the first to publish it. Thomsen defined the metal ages primarily on the basis of types of weapons and tools and, as importantly, on their find contexts. Like the great numismatists hans hildebrand, bror emil hildebrand, and sir john evans, Thomsen found that his numismatic background was of great benefit when investigating the typologies of other material. He was a formidable organizer and administrator, an innovative thinker, and a nationalist—keen to describe and celebrate the origins of denmark and the Danish people through the collections in the museum.

Owing to his extensive connections in scientific circles within Scandinavia, Thomsen advised Bror Emil Hildebrand on the arrangement of the collections of Lund University in sweden, which was also based on the three-age system. Hildebrand used the system again in the Stockholm Museum, and it had an impact on the collections in the museum at Christiana (Oslo), Norway, by 1835. By the time it was published the next year, the system had already been widely accepted in archaeological circles across Scandinavia. Consequently, Sandinavian archaeological collections were the first in Europe to be organized both regionally and culturally, and they were homogenous, large, and coherent enough to make the next stage in the development of archaeology—that of scientific analysis, periodization, and more detailed chronology—possible.

In 1839, Thomsen was appointed curator of the Art Museum and Collection of Paintings in