Re: Earliest Maya Writing Found

On Sun, 08 Jan 2006 14:52:08 GMT, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> Joseph W. Murphy wrote:
>>
>> Found this article:
>>
>> National Geographic News 1/5/06
>>
>> EARLIEST MAYA WRITING FOUND IN GUATEMALA, RESEARCHERS SAY
>
>> The article and pictures of the glyphs are at this website:
>>
>> <http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/01/0105_060105_maya_writing.html>
>
> The article in *Science* would be (marginally) preferable, since it's by
> the discoverers rather than an NGS journalist, but my contact with
> access to the online version tells me it hasn't been published in the
> print version yet and hence is not available through his institution's
> library! (The url was not given in the announcement I saw.)

The "Science Express" version (alluded to in the article) is at this URL:

<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1121745>

It's pretty short so I've reproduced it below in its entirety:

Reports
Submitted on October 24, 2005
Accepted on December 21, 2005

Early Maya Writing at San Bartolo, Guatemala
William A. Saturno 1*, David Stuart 2, Boris Beltrán 3
1 Department of Anthropology, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH
03824, USA.
2 Department of Art and Art History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin,
TX 78712, USA.
3 Escuela de Historia, Universidad de San Carlos, Guatemala City,
Guatemala.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
William A. Saturno , E-mail: wsaturno@xxxxxxx

The ruins of San Bartolo, Guatemala, contain a sample of Maya hieroglyphic
writing dating to the Late Preclassic period (400 BC to 200 AD). The
writing appears on preserved painted walls and plaster fragments buried
within the pyramidal structure known as "Las Pinturas," which was
constructed in discrete phases over several centuries. Samples of
carbonized wood that are closely associated with the writing have
calibrated radiocarbon dates of 200 to 300 BC. This early Maya writing
implies that a developed Maya writing system was in use centuries earlier
than previously thought, approximating a time when we see the earliest
scripts elsewhere in Mesoamerica

Note that Saturno's e-mail address is included should you wish to
communicate with him directly.

Joe Murphy
Boy Linguist
.

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