There is a particular emphasis here on the prehispanic writing systems found in the codices that survived the conquest and the ravages of time. Further perspective can be gleaned from the historic archives that document the culture clash that gave birth to the new world of the Americas.

Our understanding of the ancestors can be augmented by the study of native traditions & cultures, which can further be facilitated by research in languages & linguistics. Our aim is to maintain a coherent set of Web link references and provide new content of specific interest.

Click on this little guy to come back to the top.

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Ancient Writing

Frames version of
Ancient Mesoamerican Writing.
You can also link to the non-frames version.

Aztec | Borgia Group | Maya | Mixtec

The pages on Ancient Writing attempt to survey this evolution. These pages have a special emphasis on the surviving painted books of Mexico, including the mysterious Borgia Group Codices, as well as the Maya Hieroglyphic, Aztec, and Mixtec Pictographic writing systems. These books are written on bark paper or animal skin, using unique writing systems that evolved before the conquest.

There are other documents that don't particularly qualify as "ancient", but reflect a mode of communication that was to a great extent lost to time, whose meaning is still being reconstructed. In this context attention will be paid to old manuscripts written in native languages using european characters. These include the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam and Ritual of the Bacabs as well as many documents written in Nahuatl and other native languages.

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Maya Ceramics

Revised as of 21 August 1996

The great number of Maya ceramics known today gives us a tantalizing glimpse at the ancient mythological culture of the Maya.

The best book currently available on this topic is Dorie Reent-Budet's Painting the Maya Universe (which should be sitting on your bookshelf next to Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller's The Blood of Kings).

This book employs the photography of Justin Kerr who has done an incredible job of recording the known corpus of Maya Ceramics. He invented a method for photographing the vases with a continuous "roll out", so the entire image can be view at once.

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Native / Cultural Issues

SNA JTZ'IBAJOM

This was one of the first web pages that I'd created; my goal was to use the web to help generate interest (and donations) for a worthy cause. I hope it has helped the organization increase their funding.

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Archaeological Sites

Palenque | Tonina | Tikal

The always photogenic Palenque has large graphics and no commentary as yet. Tonina has been cleaned up and includes commentary - probably my best approach to formatting these pages. Tikal has thumbnails and lets you download the full-size JPG file; the photos don't approach the scale of the actual experience of this place.

There are far too many web sites to mention here, so I'll just touch upon my favorites. The first place I'll recommend for further Web exploration is the Mesoweb site affiliated with Merle Greene Robertson's Precolumbian Art Research Institute in San Francisco. PARI supports mesoamerican research and has been the major player in the promotion of the study of Maya hieroglyphs.

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Next, Virtual Palenque, a really incredible application of web technology. Dr. Thomas Guderjan can take you there, using the latest in web technology.

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I haven't had time to scan my photos from Uxmal, the first Maya site I'd visited. You might want to check out Nancy McNelly's Virtual House of the Governor at Uxmal, an exploration of three dimensional space using VRML. Spend some time looking at her interesting pages, and follow her links to the "spoken Mayan" sound files.

The Feathered Serpent Pyramid Home Page is a most
interesting site focusing on Teotihuacan archaeology and
iconography. For real archaeology on the web, check it out.

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The Mesoamerican Calendar

In the study of the ancient books, it's important to get to know the native calendar. Mesoamerica as a culture area is defined by the native use of this calendar, which can be found even among the earliest peoples.

The ancient books represented within these pages were written by the native people of Mexico and Guatemala; including the Mexica and their neighbors in the Valley of Mexico and the surrounding area, the Maya of Guatemala, Chiapas, and the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Mixtec and Zapotec tribes of Oaxaca. They all shared variations of this calendar.

It is a combination of a 260 day Sacred Calendar (twenty repeating day names and thirteen numbers that follow sequentially) and a 365 day annual calendar (divided into 18 periods of 20 days each followed by a special period with only 5 days). These are counted forward in an interlocking cycle. Each day of the year draws one element from the 260 day calendar, and one element from the 365 day calendar. In this way, no individual day name repeats for 52 years.

I've created another page that has links to Mesoamerican Calendar Pages on the Web. You'll find many other pages to explore to learn more about this.

The above glyph construction (and impossible calendar round)
came to us courtesy of the New World Emporium.

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Sites in progress & Other Links

Goddesses in the Borgia Codex Group is now online.

I heard from the webmaster at Arqueologia Mexicana. This site is coming along nicely; check up on their development, and consider ordering a subscription to this publication.

Thomas Bürglin's list of Mesoamerican and Pre-Colombian related sites is mirrored at another site by Brian Ampolsk and is the primary source of almost all known mesoamerican related links. I'm sure you'll end up spending a lot of time poking around here; it's chock full of cool links. (This is the "motherlode" of Mesoamerican links!)

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Related Periodicals

Don't miss the Sept-Oct 1997 issue of Archaeology magazine,
featuring special online content on the Search for Site Q.