One of the great innovations of the 8th century Maya world, full-figure inscriptions appeared at four Maya sites over the span of 100 years: Palenque, Copán, Yaxchilán, and Quiriguá. These inscriptions, while linguistically sound and conforming to the genre of monumental dedication texts, present a complex visual landscape for analysis. In this presentation, I summarize the key takeaways of my analysis of this corpus, which formed my dissertation at Tulane.

Maps and maritime journals are essential instruments while navigating uncharted waters. However, these sources can also provide other forms to understand landscapes and communities. When French direct trade took the coasts of Peru by storm during the first decades of the eighteenth century, the King of France commissioned sailors to survey the coasts and provide detailed maps and descriptions that could help the French understand the territory better. Nonetheless, these journals were even further than providing navigational information.

Language has a natural tendency to change over time – except when it doesn’t. During a 300-year period at Tikal, the demands of genre dictate an astounding adherence to grammatical form in monumental texts of the historical narrative genre. This presentation provides the audience with foundational knowledge on literacy as a social practice before discussing specific findings on the apparent conservatism of grammar in selected Late Classic texts.

Since 2020, the MARI-GISLAB team has been focusing on the so-called G-LiHT lidar dataset, published by NASA in 2013. Despite the caveat that these data had not been collected with archaeological research in mind, some studies based on them provided a picture of the Maya settlement in southern Campeche and Southern Quintana Roo, that was in many ways divergent from what we had projected on the basis of the Peten Pacunam lidar data in 2018. Particularly surprising to us was the lack of dense urban zones and the high frequency of agricultural terraces, according to those studies.