Old Glyphs and New Software Help Unravel the Mysteries of the Maya : Archeology: The ancient Central American people were masters of abstract knowledge. Scientists are finding living links between them and the present.

After two months poring over 1,200-year-old hieroglyphics and computerized star maps, Linda Schele felt a shiver of awe as she stood in the cemetery of a Mexican hilltop village on a recent starry night.

When she returned to the University of Texas, Schele boasted to colleagues of having glimpsed the outlines of a system of beliefs that emerged thousands of years ago, survived the Spanish Conquest and thrives today in isolated pockets of Central America.

Schele believes she has discovered how the ancient Maya used their arcane knowledge of astronomy to create powerful art and mythology. At times, she says, the Maya lords manipulated the data to persuade their subjects that they were gods.

Participants in a workshop Schele conducted said her work would enrich interpretations of pre-Columbian art and writing and should further encourage the cultural renewal among the 5 million people in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras who speak the Mayan language.

American scholars have even begun teaching the Guatemalan Maya to read hieroglyphics that their ancestors etched in stone and scrawled on palace walls and fig tree bark-paper as long as 2,000 years ago.

Though anthropologists have long been aware of folkways that date to antiquity, Schele says her work demonstrates the persistence of a genuine body of Mayan thought.

Readings of lushly adorned stucco carvings show the ancient Maya kings sought to time their coronations, wars and marriages with movements of the planets and constellations, in elaborate mimicry of Mayan creation myths, Schele said.

The belief that the doings of gods and kings are mapped out in the sky was “shared by the people so profoundly and deeply that it survived the collapse” of the civilization, she said. “It survived the Conquest, it survived 500 years of systematic genocide and cultural suppression. It is alive today.

“This knowledge, to a people who have had their history stripped from them and told they exist only as a byproduct of what European culture made them . . . is a bloody miracle.”

Using the few remaining books in Mayan script, as well as modern tools such as computer software that can display on the screen a picture of the sky on any night in the last 6,000 years, Schele linked baroque imagery salvaged from the mossy walls of ruined temples with modern Mayan celestial observations.

On March 5, she attended a late-night vigil in the southern Mexico town of San Juan Chamula. She described the vigil as an outgrowth of the old knowledge, though it has a Christian camouflage and the Chamula Maya probably are unaware of its origins.

The observation of the heavens nominally marks the Resurrection of Christ, but it takes place at the same time of year as the “Raising of the Sky” described in monuments such as the 7th Century Tablet of the Cross at the city of Palenque, whose ruins lie 80 miles to the north.

At midnight, as Schele watched, the Milky Way rose perpendicular to the horizon above the wooden crosses that tower over the hill. It symbolized Christ’s Ascension, Schele said, but also coincides with the rebirth of the Mayas’ First Father, co-creator of their world.

In 150 years or less, it may be impossible to see the Milky Way anywhere in the world because of light pollution, Schele says. Scientists will have consult computers to see the sky.

“What is tremendously exciting is that we’ve got the present-day Maya to help us understand,” said Peter Mathews, an epigrapher, or hieroglyphic expert, at the University of Calgary in Canada. “Unlike the people of so many other ancient civilizations, like the Mesopotamians, the Maya’s links to the past have been kept alive--under the guise of Christianity.”

Archeologists have known for a century that the Maya of what is called the Classic Period, roughly AD 300 to AD 900, were masters of abstract knowledge, the only American Indian culture to develop an original system of writing. They recorded calendrics, astronomy, history and religion. Their system of mathematics, including a concept of zero, was an achievement not equaled in Europe until centuries later.

But until about 1960, the inability to read glyphs other than those concerned with esoterica led many experts to conclude that the Maya had been a peaceful, priestly race of time-obsessed stargazers.

Over the last 30 years, Schele, Mathews and about a dozen other epigraphers have broken the code of the faded squiggles and dots. These glyphs reveal the bellicose history of monarchical city-states in which “blood was the mortar of society,” in Schele’s words.

David Freidel, who, with Schele, wrote the recent book “Forest of Kings,” said the Mayan rulers manipulated astronomy to justify or protect their ventures.

Tablets that Chan Bahlum erected to celebrate his coronation as king of Palenque in AD 690 exemplify the political uses to which celestial readings were put.

Chan Bahlum’s grandmother, Zak-Kuk, is described with the same glyph that names First Mother, a mythical ancestor. By linking his clan to First Mother, Chan Bahlum validated the unorthodox matrilineal basis of his family’s power, Freidel says.

One tablet states that First Mother became king of Palenque on the same day of the year as the Maya creation date in 3114 BC. Only a sophisticated star chart could have allowed Chan Bahlum to make the correlation, Freidel said, and only an audience enslaved to the heavens would have cared.

“Now we know what they were doing with the astronomy,” Freidel said. “It wasn’t just intellectual fooling around, but practical information put to a political use.”

Epigraphers have translated as much as 90% of the Maya syllables and word-signs, and some leaders in the field are shifting their focus to the religious, astronomical and natural symbols of the glyphs and the art with them.

As they broaden their focus, these specialists increasingly compare the Maya cosmology to that of the Aztecs, Mixtec and Zapotec of highland Mexico, and even to tribes of the Amazon and North America.

A Creek medicine man from Tallahassee, Fla., attended the workshop to see what his people shared with the Maya.

“Once you go beyond your specialty to start looking at these different Meso-American cultures, you see that it’s really one culture, just using different visual styles,” said David Stuart of Vanderbilt University. Stuart, who won a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1984 at age 18, now describes himself as a “Meso-Americanist” rather than a “Mayanist.”

Some specialists also question conventional ways of classifying Maya history. Dennis Tedlock, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo and translator of the 16th- Century Quiche Maya holy book, the Popol Vuh, said the idea of a “classic” Maya civilization should be ditched.

Archeologists date the collapse of the Classic Period to AD 900, after which the Maya abandoned some jungle cities and stopped erecting stone monuments inscribed with their Long Count calendar dates.

This decline often is used to explain the ease with which the Spanish subdued the Maya 600 years later.

“The archeologists have created the myth that the post-Classic Period was some kind of dark age, but this period had better books, better astronomers, bigger political entities and further refinements of the writing style,” Tedlock said. “They just didn’t put it on stone.

“The next argument is that it wasn’t so bad when the Spanish came along because, after all, the Maya were dead anyway.”

Not all scholars share the conviction that the Maya of today represent links on an unbroken chain to Palenque.

Richard Wilk, an Indiana University anthropologist, believes Freidel, Schele and others have succumbed to a mystical view of the Maya, “attaching cultural attributes to people who lived in different areas over 2,000 years, as if those attributes were inherited.”

Sympathizers are conspiring with the modern Maya to embellish their connections to the past, as a means of boosting Maya political clout and ethnic pride, Wilk said.

“We’re helping them mystify it,” he says. “That may be OK in a political sense, but it isn’t anthropology.”

William Sanders, a Penn State archeologist, levels his criticism from another angle: that the emphasis on glyph reading is leading the field to stray from its base in the archeological record; the pottery shards, pollen grains and defensive walls that Sanders said will explain events such as the collapse of the Classic Period.

“As an archeologist, I couldn’t care less whether the modern Maya preserve their ancient cultural traditions,” Sanders said.