“Continuing the Decipherment of Ancient MayaTextual Hand Signs: Altar Q and Beyond”

with Richard Alejandro Sandoval, PhD, Linguistics, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Metropolitan State University – Denver The hand forms depicted with the figural art in Ancient Maya texts have been a source of intrigue and mystery. Seemingly impenetrable and overshadowed by scholarly engrossment with hieroglyphs and iconography, the hands are mostly ignored in the literature. But there is little doubt that the hands, with their peculiar and precise forms, were an important symbolic resource for Maya scribes – akin to the hand signs of a signed language. With this (hand sign + graphic symbol) perspective on the hand forms, I developed a novel approach to their initial decipherment. I first identified Classic Copan’s Altar Q as the closest thing to a Rosetta Stone. I then conducted an analysis of it, with results based on a convergence of evidence. The research, detailed in a recently published technical article (“The Ancient Maya Script of Hand Forms Embedded in Figural Art”), has received a fair amount of attention and prompted good dialogue. But aspects of the research technicalities have proved daunting for some. In this talk, I aim to further clarify and bolster the research, with the primary goal of developing scholarly engagement with it and, more generally, with Ancient Maya textual hand signs. Rich A. Sandoval is a linguistic anthropologist with a broad interest in the diverse communication traditions of Indigenous America, especially the widespread, long-lived, yet largely unrecognized practices involving signed language. He is specifically focused on practices of combining hand-sign-based and speech-based language into coherent expressions and discourses. His earlier work examines this phenomenon in Arapaho language, indigenous to the Great Plains. Lately he has been exploring the phenomenon within Ancient Maya texts, with writing that seems to combine hieroglyphs and the hand signs held by depicted persons or other figures. But just what the textual hand signs mean and how they are formed is not well understood. Engaged with this particular problem, he has taken initial steps in an article titled, “The Ancient Maya Script of Hand Forms Embedded in Figural Art: A Decipherment of Numerals Signed by the Rulers of Altar Q,” which was published last July in Transactions of the Philological Society. A reduced version is in the January Aztlander. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel. To receive free monthly issues of The Aztlander: Voice of the Ancient Americas, contact host Jim Reed at: [email protected]