complete expression of a writing system devised by any of the civilizations of mesoamerica. The decipherment process, to which numerous scholars have contributed over many decades, has been a gradual one, but the language is now largely deciphered and understood.

The history of research into Maya epigraphy started with a Spanish priest named Diego de Landa, who wrote a treatise on the Maya of northern Yucatán in the mid-sixteenth century. He included a brief but garbled account of Maya writing—the closest thing we have to a Rosetta stone for the Maya script. Although Landa completely misunderstood the nature of the script (he assumed it was an alphabetic system, when in fact it is composed of syllable signs and word signs), he did elicit from an informant some forty signs and their (approximate) phonetic value.

Little more was done with the script until the mid-eighteenth century. At that time explorers were beginning to penetrate the thick tropical forest of the Yucatán Peninsula, where they would discover ruined cities of classic Maya civilization. One of these explorers, john lloyd stephens, produced some best-selling “travel books” that were beautifully illustrated by his artist companion, frederick catherwood. These books stimulated other explorers to follow in their footsteps, and by the end of the nineteenth century most of the great classic Maya cities had been discovered. Meanwhile, discoveries of another sort were being made in Europe: three painted books or codices (at least one of which was probably included in treasure sent by Hernán Cortés to the king of Spain) were rediscovered, and it was recognized that they were written in Maya script. By 1900 several Maya sites had been explored quite scientifically, and their stone monuments and inscriptions were faithfully recorded in photographs and drawings. The stage was set for the decipherment process to begin.

The earliest attempts at decipherment took two directions. One involved an intensive analysis of the chronological component of Maya texts. Most Maya inscriptions have a calendrical framework in which dates are recorded at the beginning of sentences. Many of the details of the calendar were known from writers such as Landa and also from the remnants of the calendar that have survived to the present day. Although the Maya calendar is quite complex, with several intermeshing cyclical counts, it was almost completely deciphered by 1900.

The other direction of research involved noncalendrical glyphs. The focus (especially at first) was on the codices, and there was much discussion concerning the nature of the script. Early on it was determined that the script was not alphabetic. But was it syllabic or logographic in nature? Between 1890 and 1914, as intense discussion on this issue continued, much of the general content of the codices was worked out, and signs were read correctly in some cases.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the recently deciphered calendrical component of Maya writing dovetailed nicely with the new phase of Maya research: large-scale excavations of classic Maya sites by prominent research institutions, especially ones based in the United States. Chronology, of course, was a major component of this work, and since the carved Maya monuments usually contained dates that were assumed to be contemporary with their carving, the race was on to find more and more monuments. Hundreds of new inscriptions were discovered during the first half of the twentieth century, and they provided the chronological framework for the new excavations (even though the correlation between the Maya and Christian calendars was not completely agreed upon during these decades).

Gradually, the dates recorded on the carved monuments became all-consuming to scholars, many of whom came to believe that dates were all that the inscriptions contained. Depicting the Maya as a society of rural peasant farmers watched over by small groups of ascetic calendar priests, these scholars contended that it would have been sacrilegious to record anything other than the calendar (personal histories, for example) in Maya texts.

This view was to change dramatically at the end of the 1950s, largely through the work of two researchers. In 1958 the Mexican scholar Heinrich Berlin published two articles in which he identified glyphs that referred in some way to individual Maya cities. The following year he