Article

Journal of Social Archaeology

13(2) 177–196
Mediating the Maya: ! The Author(s) 2013
Reprints and permissions:
Hieroglyphic imaging sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1469605313483913

and objectivity jsa.sagepub.com

Matthew C. Watson
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina
State University, USA

Abstract
Drawing from the science studies literature on scientific visualization, this essay
examines how techniques of imaging Maya hieroglyphs have established conditions
that constrain contemporary scholars’ systems of historical imagination and interpret-
ation. I discuss imaging techniques innovated by three significant Mayanists: J. Eric S.
Thompson, Merle Greene Robertson, and Linda Schele. Building on the work of his-
torians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, I identify these Mayanist scholars’
techniques of visualization as established practices of ‘mechanical objectivity’ and
‘trained judgment’. These practices helped to reduce aesthetically complex and materi-
ally diverse ancient Maya inscriptions to the equivalent of modernist texts. I question
this reduction, drawing from the work of Bruno Latour to advocate an empirical atten-
tiveness to the located and embodied material practices that produce equivalences
between objects rendered in diverse media: stone, paint, paper, and pixels. The essay
thus calls for the extension of context-oriented archaeological empiricism to practices
of image production.

Keywords
Epigraphy, imaging, Maya studies, objectivity, reduction, visualization

Corresponding author:
Matthew C. Watson, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, 334 1911 Building, North Carolina State
University, Raleigh, NC 27695–8107, USA.
Email: matthew.clay.watson@gmail.com
178 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

Introduction
Diverse contemporary scholars examine how imaging techniques and technologies
shape historical fields such as archaeology and art history (e.g. Banks and Vokes,
2010; Cochrane and Russell, 2007; Gillespie, 2011; Moser, 2012; Smiles and Moser,
2005; Swogger, 2000; Winter, 1998). Archaeologists’ imaging practices translate
particular soils, features, artifacts, and monuments into reproducible paper-and-
ink and digital forms that circulate among knowledge consumers. Archaeological
images mutate as they move across fieldwork notebooks, scholarly publications,
popular magazines, and museums. Such inscriptions condition consumers’ virtual
attachments to distant objects of knowledge (cf. Latour, 1987; Shapin and Schaffer,
1985). Their specific materialities enable and constrain systems of historical imagin-
ation, constituting different affective dispositions to the past.
Drawing from the science and technology studies (STS) literature on scientific
visualization (see Burri and Dumit, 2008), this essay examines how techniques of
re-inscribing Maya hieroglyphs and imagery have conditioned scholars’ systems of
historical imagination and affect. I focus on imaging techniques devised by three
significant twentieth-century Mayanists: J. Eric S. Thompson, Merle Greene
Robertson, and Linda Schele. Thompson compiled a catalog of hieroglyphs, help-
ing to render the inscriptions intelligible as individual units of meaning. Robertson,
in turn, produced rubbings of monumental imagery and glyphs, enabling diverse
stone inscriptions to be simulated and consumed at a distance. Finally, through
skillful line-drawing techniques, Schele enabled hieroglyphs and imagery to be
parsed, cut up, and experienced in new ways. I suggest that these three imaging
practices were vital to the rise of arguments for hieroglyphs’ grammaticality in the
1970s and 1980s. These arguments, frequently glossed as ‘Maya hieroglyphic
decipherment’, have prompted an incomplete epistemic shift by treating hiero-
glyphs as fully grammatical texts rather than abstract astronomical signs and
rebus-writing.
The scholars whose techniques I examine here did not have a unified view of
hieroglyphs’ grammaticality. Thompson opposed arguments that hieroglyphs were
writing. Robertson supported but did not contribute directly to decipherment.
Schele played a major role in decipherment. But their material techniques were
all integral to consolidating Maya hieroglyphs – diverse inscriptions carved into
stone architecture and wooden objects and painted onto ceramic pots and bark-
paper books (or ‘codices’) between the third and seventeenth centuries CE – as a
single script. Extending the work of science studies scholar Bruno Latour (1987,
1990, 1999, 2005), here I develop the claim that these scholars’ material practices
operated through translations producing chains of equivalences, transforming het-
erogeneous objects into standardized scientific facts that could be known and
manipulated at a distance from their original material contexts.
These facts, of course, are also artifacts of archaeologists’ and art historians’
technical practices. Historical images emerge through scholars’ intimate encounters
with material traces of the past. Whether we are discussing the Iron Age
Watson 179

Africanist’s drawing of a furnace, the Americanist historical archaeologist’s ren-

dering of gravestone designs, or the Mayanist’s rubbing of a monument, the pro-
duction of images as ‘immutable mobiles’ (Latour, 1987) erases the located
specificity of the scholar–artifact encounter. Imagers – and perhaps even the
images themselves – seem to want image-consumers to ignore the technical prac-
tices of image production. But ignoring these practices risks assuming direct
equivalence or correspondence between the image and the imaged. The assumed
correspondence obfuscates how Maya hieroglyphs and late-modern writing func-
tion pragmatically through different kinds of cultural, material, and linguistic con-
texts. Thus this essay is a call for extending context-oriented empiricism to
practices of image production.

Irreductionism and Mayanist imaging

Mayanist epigraphy requires techniques of classification and standardization.
Classification and standardization pervasively structure practices inside and out-
side science. In their examination of the topic, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan
Leigh Star (1999: 10, emphasis in original) define classification in these terms: ‘A
classification is a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world. A
‘‘classification system’’ is a set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things
can be put to then do some kind of work – bureaucratic or knowledge production.’
By the late 1950s, scholars began to reclassify Maya hieroglyphs, putting them into
a new box, treating them as grammatical writing and historical records.
Thompson (1950) and Sylvanus Morley (1946) had categorized hieroglyphs as
icons, rebuses, and logographs (or word signs) serving limited religious purposes
and lacking a full signifying capacity. Two main innovations preconditioned a turn
away from emphasizing glyphs’ calendrical functions and toward reclassifying
hieroglyphs as writing: identification of phonetic signs (Knorosov, 1952, 1958)
and identification of patterned dates indicating texts’ historical content
(Proskouriakoff, 1960; see also Berlin, 1958). Such early reclassifications began
to alter the kinds of work entailed in epigraphy. Thompson, the leading epigrapher
of the 1950s and 1960s, resisted Yuri Knorosov’s argument that a substantial
proportion of hieroglyphs were phonetic signs. Yet Knorosov’s and Tatiana
Proskouriakoff’s innovations conditioned the possibility for hieroglyphic analysis
to improve understanding of ancient Maya history in addition to cosmology.
The reclassification of Maya hieroglyphs was not a uniform development. Just
as Thompson resisted Knorosov’s arguments, Proskouriakoff expressed some
doubts about hieroglyphs’ grammaticality through the 1970s. Although Mayanist
David H. Kelley supported Knorosov’s arguments and undertook phonetic ana-
lyses, his work did not receive significant attention until Deciphering the Maya
Script was published in 1976. Strong claims that hieroglyphs were ‘more’ than
icons, rebuses, and logographs did not develop until Peter Mathews, Linda
Schele, and Floyd Lounsbury achieved readings evidencing that Maya glyphs
combined logographs with phonetic signs in a fully syntactic manner
180 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

(e.g. Mathews and Schele, 1974; Schele, 1982). In turn, accompanying images,
sometimes glossed as ‘iconography’, could no longer be understood as primarily
or entirely mythological. Many such images became comprehensible as historical
representations of elite Maya figures (Schele and Miller, 1986).
Such interpretive shifts developed within a transforming technological and
aesthetic matrix. Reclassification of Maya glyphs required production of standar-
dized, circulable images. A substantial body of science studies literature has
addressed this theme, establishing the importance of imaging practices to the
formation of epistemic certainty (e.g. Baigrie, 1996; Baldasso, 2006; Daston
and Galison, 1992, 2007; Jones and Galison, 1998; Latour, 1990; Lefèvre,
2003; McAllister, 2002; Tucker, 2005). Of particular relevance here is Lorraine
Daston and Peter Galison’s (2007) history of scientific imaging and atlases, in
which they maintain that the rise of objectivity as an epistemic virtue was not
coeval with the rise of science. Objectivity, as a suppression of the self in the
production of knowledge, became an epistemic virtue in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, when mechanical technologies first enabled scientists to produce purportedly
untouched images.
As I develop below, Maya hieroglyphic studies has entailed practices that
strongly resemble those that Daston and Galison (2007) categorize as ‘mechanical
objectivity’ and ‘trained judgment’. Attending to the specific material practices of
scientific imaging opens up questions concerning how to conceive forms of object-
ivity attentive to the embodied practices and material situatedness of knowledge
production (e.g. Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1986; Wylie, 2004). Thompson’s,
Robertson’s, and Schele’s techniques were situated material practices that can be
reconstructed through analysis of their published materials. Here I trace how these
researchers abstracted hieroglyphs from material and aesthetic contexts, producing
inscriptions that could be segmented, manipulated, and distributed at a distance
from the monuments, ceramic vessels, or books where they performed their original
cultural work.
This analysis draws particularly on Latour’s principle of irreduction: ‘nothing is,
by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else’ (1988: 158; quoted in
Harman, 2009: 12). Latour maintains that no object or concept fully replicates
or substitutes for another. Genes do not autonomously govern personalities.
Socioeconomic interests do not simply determine scientific interpretations. In
turn, images of hieroglyphs do not transparently reproduce original inscriptions.
In his book on the philosophical implications of Latour’s ontology, Graham
Harman (2009: 13) describes the implications of the principle that actors do not
transform without mutation:

Every human and nonhuman object now stands by itself as a force to reckon with. No
actor, however trivial, will be dismissed as mere noise in comparison with its essence,
its context, its physical body, or its conditions of possibility. Everything will be abso-
lutely concrete; all objects and all modes of dealing with objects will now be on the
same footing.
Watson 181

No actor straightforwardly reduces to another, but this does not render explan-
ation impossible. Rather:

. . . it is always possible to explain anything in terms of anything else – as long as

we do the work of showing how one can be transformed into the other, through
a chain of equivalences that always has a price and always risks failure. (Harman,
2009: 15)

The goal of this essay is to trace chains of equivalences in Mayanist imaging

practices. This is an especially pressing problem in hieroglyphic studies.
Epigraphers have asserted that hieroglyphs are transparent signs providing direct
access to ancient thoughts (Houston, 2000: 128; Stuart, 1993: 322). Inflecting
Latour’s empiricism with linguistic anthropologists’ insistence that a speech act’s
sense emerges through its cultural context (Errington, 2001; Malinowski,
1994[1923]; Schieffelin et al., 1998; Silverstein, 1979), I maintain that the assump-
tion that Maya hieroglyphs can be translated directly into late-modern, post-
Gutenberg Press text obfuscates as much as it elucidates. Through practices
that construct equivalences or associations between previously unrelated actors,
scholars have articulated Maya inscriptions and contemporary writing.
In so doing, epigraphers have embraced an epistemology that reduces language
to a system operating in an aseptic vacuum and entailing direct correspondence
between signs and referents (e.g. Houston et al., 2001). I hold that the language of
ancient Maya inscriptions is more and less than a direct reflection of ancient Maya
words and thoughts. It is more in the sense that ancient Maya signs, like all signs,
function through a multiplicity of relations with disparate actors in their environ-
ments, including, but not limited to, humans. These relations or – to use a term
from Karen Barad (2007) that emphasizes the co-constitution of scientists and
scientific objects – ‘intra-actions’ could be the topic of significant archaeological
and epigraphic work tracing the situated functionalities of specific hieroglyphic
inscriptions. It is less in the sense that ancient Maya signs, like all signs, do
not intrinsically reference anything, and achieve sense and consequence through
situated, pragmatic forms of ordinary usage (e.g. Hanks, 1990).
Through a methodological commitment to ‘follow the actors themselves’
(Latour, 2005: 12), I examine how hieroglyphic knowledge production is predicated
upon chains of local equivalences, or ‘partial connections’ (Strathern, 1991), that
link hieroglyphs’ simulations to referents, as opposed to direct sign-referent cor-
respondences (cf. Latour, 1999). I emphasize how imaging practices entail both
equivalences and ‘cuts’ (Barad, 2007; Strathern, 1996; Watson, 2011), practices of
deferring or marginalizing material objects that enabled signs to function in their
original contexts. While Mayanist epigraphers have heralded decipherment as a
process of imparting ‘voice’ and ‘history’ to the ancient Maya (e.g. Schele and
Mathews, 1998), careful attention to the field’s imaging practices reveals how
this epistemic shift actually risks reducing complex material-semiotic things to
monovocal, immutable ‘texts’.
182 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

J. Eric S. Thompson’s catalog

Thompson published A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs in 1962. Although
Thompson opposed Knorosov’s (1958) phoneticism, the catalog ultimately enabled
hieroglyphic decipherment. Here I rethink the catalog as a box of equivalences
predicated upon cuts that marginalize the material texture and aesthetic complexity
of specific empirically accessible hieroglyphs and establish ideal hieroglyphic types
as standards.
Thompson was not the first or last scholar to classify glyphs systematically. Such
efforts date to Diego de Landa’s (1994[c.1566]) attempt to discern the structure of
hieroglyphic writing, an inquiry flawed by his mistaken presumption that hiero-
glyphs functioned alphabetically. The first attempts to produce catalogs that typo-
logically structured glyphs from codices and monuments, however, did not emerge
until the twentieth century. In 1931 William Gates published An Outline Dictionary
of Maya Glyphs, the first attempt to catalog hieroglyphs appearing in the three
then-known codices. Günter Zimmermann (1956) later improved on Gates’ catalog
in his Die Hieroglyphen der Maya-Handschriften.
Gates and Zimmermann focused almost exclusively on codices, neglecting
monumental inscriptions. Thompson (1962) rectified this omission with a catalog
categorizing signs from both sources. The catalog divides 862 signs into three
categories: affixes, main signs, and portraits. He provides individual listings that
document the material contexts of many affixes and the 356 main signs (e.g.
Figure 1). Individual listings cite as few as one example of the sign and as many
as 611 examples.
Thompson (1962: 5–9) offers sufficient description to follow the chain of equiva-
lences entailed in the catalog’s production. He began by acquiring photographs
or photostats of as many drawings of monumental hieroglyphs as possible.

Figure 1. An abbreviated sample listing of a main sign, the Half-spotted Ahau, from A Catalog
of Maya Hieroglyphs. Drawing by Lucas Martindale Johnson, after Thompson (1962: 152), repro-
duced with permission. Text below the sign provides details of the sign’s position within glyph
blocks on architectural inscriptions at Copán and Yaxchilán. The original listing provides an
additional 24 examples.
Watson 183

He individuated the signs appearing in photographs and photostats, as well as

those in drawings by Hermann Beyer. Thompson literally cut them apart and
mounted them on large ‘gray cards’ (23.5x18.5 cm) with one or more cards desig-
nated for each main sign. This was a materially intensive project of cutting and
pasting (cf. Watson, 2012: 290–291), rendering the hieroglyphic system structurally
sensible: ‘In the case of some of the commonest glyphs, such as Imix with 611
entries and Cauac with 427 entries, a dozen or more cards were needed’
(Thompson, 1962: 6). Thompson did not include codex and pottery glyphs on
gray cards. He added these directly in transforming gray cards into catalog listings.
Converting gray cards into catalog entries posed difficulties. It introduced the
problem of confirming that the ideal image that headed each listing faithfully rep-
resented the definitive qualities distinguishing the type, a process resembling bio-
logical atlas makers’ efforts to produce typical images between the seventeenth and
mid-nineteenth centuries (Daston and Galison, 2007: 70–75). This reduction, sub-
ordinating real, material hieroglyphs to an abstract type, was further complicated
by the damaged quality of original hieroglyphs and the poor quality of images. On
this point, Thompson (1962: 8) expresses reservations about the catalog:

Identification of such damaged specimens from indifferent photographs can hardly be

objective. Indeed, decision [sic] whether to accept, query, or reject an identification
must on occasions have depended on passing mood or the flow of gastric juices. Users
of the catalog should bear in mind the subjectivity of my approach, and be prepared to
re-examine my very fallible identification before drawing any conclusions.

Thompson lacked complete confidence in his determination of signs’ essential

meanings, emphasizing the burden on catalog-users to check types against original
sources (which are, I might add, still abstracted from original objects). He notes
that his use of an indefinite article (a) – rather than a definite article (the) – before
the titular term Catalog indicates the ‘subjectivity’ troubling his compilation
(Thompson, 1962: 9). In this prefatory remark, Thompson even invokes the embo-
died specificity of categorization, commenting that ‘gastric juices’ occasionally
diverted him, cutting analysis short. Despite this admitted ‘subjectivity’,
Thompson’s drawings became accepted standards. In the introduction to a later
catalog, Kornelia Kurbjuhn (1989: i) describes Thompson’s drawings as ‘a glyphic
lingua franca’ that each convey ‘the essence of a sign’.
Thompson’s chain of translations produced a circulable volume comprised of
individual glyph listings. Each listing is headed by a glyph number, followed by a
clarification of the number of existing examples, reference to gray card numbers,
and numbers for listings in Gates’ and Zimmermann’s catalogs (if the glyphs were
included therein). Beneath this basic information, the catalog-user finds an image
of the sign in question. Each entry ends with a list of the original hieroglyphs used
to create the abstract type, denoted by reference to their locations in monumental
inscriptions and codices. These entries further specify associated signs, designated
by their respective Thompson-numbers (or ‘T-numbers’). Thompson extended the
184 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

material and semiotic labor of imperial travel writers and archaeologists who
produced his source documents. But his terminological conventions typically
point users ‘directly’ to examples of each type. Users of the catalog must perform
their own epistemic labor to trace the network of production back to original
examples, mediated by his addendum on the ‘Sources of Texts’ (Thompson,
1962: 404–411) and the associated bibliography. The catalog shortcuts the empir-
ical chain of equivalences by instituting categorical types that stage ‘direct’ refer-
ences between listings and virtually consolidated worldly things.
Despite Thompson’s explicit uncertainty, his catalog has irrefutably shaped
Maya hieroglyphs’ reduction to writing, providing one way to designate signs
within epigraphic discourse. The T-number assigned to each listing functions as
an ‘immutable mobile’ (Latour, 1987) enabling the sign to be inscribed in standard
typesetting without constantly reproducing images. While the interpreted meanings
of many signs have shifted over the decades, their respective T-numbers provide
stable means to designate them. T-numbers enable heterogeneous objects’ reduc-
tion to standardized signs such as ‘T539’. While ‘T539’ supposedly denotes a sign’s
‘essence’, it is cut from its conditions of cultural use, what Bronislaw Malinowski
(1994[1923]) classically termed an utterance’s ‘context of situation’.
Thompson’s catalog established obligatory conventions of hieroglyphic analysis
and discourse. It serves as a model for efforts to produce updated catalogs (e.g.
Kurbjuhn, 1989; Macri and Looper, 2003), which may be perceived by epigraphers
as reflections of disciplinary rigor. The catalog achieves power by eliding inscrip-
tions’ heterogeneity, aesthetic complexity, and markers of specific scribes or scribal
styles. It effectively dehistoricizes glyphs by introducing the illusion of direct cor-
respondence between typologically abstract signs and heterogeneous empirical
examples. The catalog transformed hieroglyphs into a closed system of context-
independent signs, cut from contiguous non-hieroglyph actors (e.g. imagery, archi-
tecture, and environment) and purified into decipherable proto-text.

Merle Greene Robertson’s rubbings

Robertson was not principally concerned with exploring the linguistic basis of
Maya hieroglyphic writing. Yet, beginning in the 1960s, her research helped con-
dition the inscriptions’ epistemic transformation. While Robertson employed both
photography and drawings to document Maya art, imagery, and hieroglyphs,
I focus here on a practice that has not received treatment in STS imaging studies:
ink and oil rubbings on paper and cloth. Robertson’s techniques became crucial for
rendering monumental inscriptions visible and consumable for ‘virtual witnesses’
(Shapin and Schaffer, 1985). The rubbings are consequential objects for rendering
Maya hieroglyphs and modernist writing equivalent. Robertson’s rubbings brought
monumental inscriptions into a new regime of vision, shaping not only how hiero-
glyphs are experienced but also – due to the high quantity of rubbings completed
and the mobility of these objects – where hieroglyphs are experienced.
Watson 185

The rubbings entailed a traceable series of practices through which inscriptions

gave rise to simulations. The existing account of these practices (Robertson, 2006)
enables their review. First, Robertson taped paper or cloth to a stone or stucco
monument. She generally used rice paper but also employed mulberry paper for
fragile inscriptions. Robertson dampened the paper with a badger-hair brush,
chosen on account of the filaments’ firm adherence to the handle. Avoiding the
hairs’ transfer to the paper was crucial to evading artifacts in the simulation. She
pounded the paper into the stone’s variegated surfaces using ‘a wad of men’s hand-
kerchiefs or several American Airline washcloths’ (Robertson, 2006: 50). Robertson
would allow the paper to nearly dry and proceed to apply sumi ink or a mixture
comprised of black- and burnt sienna-colored Winsor Newton oil paint. Oil was
required for inscriptions in the humid Petén department of Guatemala because moss
that builds up on monuments’ surfaces transfers too much moisture for water-solu-
ble sumi ink. Because of sumi ink’s tendency to bleed between adjoining sheets,
Robertson preferred oil for large inscriptions requiring the use of multiple over-
lapping sheets, such as the sarcophagus lid in Palenque’s Temple of the Inscriptions.
She covered a pad in sumi ink using a palette knife and transferred ink with a silk-
wrapped cotton ball. Or, she covered a piece of tin with a layer of oil paint and
transferred it to the paper with her thumb:

I would gently press onto the tin with oil and then on to [sic] the rice paper or cloth,
building the intensity of color up gradually until the desired effect was achieved.
This took forever as thousands of thumb prints were necessary to complete just one
monument. (Robertson, 2006: 50)

An example of the resulting images is reproduced and juxtaposed against a

photograph of the same monument in Figure 2. Through this juxtaposition readers
can discern effects of Robertson’s translation of monumental inscriptions into
rubbings. As rubbings function on the basis of water adhering to inscriptions’
raised features and repelling ink or oil as it is applied, the marking blackens the
recessed, low-relief lines and spaces. It leaves the inscription’s high-relief compo-
nents comparatively unmarked, revealing the white color of the paper or cloth, in
some places shaded into gray. The translation’s immediate result is an increased
contrast between raised inscriptions and background.
The technique produces a partial connection rather than an absolute equiva-
lence. Rubbings obscure depth and accentuate contrast. The sensuous dimension-
ality of the lintel (the differential depth of its relief) becomes a play of shadings
in the two-dimensional rubbing (cf. Jones, 2001). While the photograph is also
two-dimensional, the shadows reveal the carving’s uneven depth, a kind of techno-
logical trickery evincing multiple planes of the monument’s surface. The photo-
graph simulates a worldliness absent in the rubbing. This is the trade-off of the
rubbing as an artistic-scientific mediator. The lintel’s lines become vividly defined
at the expense of reducing the appearance of texture and depth (as well as color in
cases where monuments’ paint remains).
186 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

Figure 2. A rubbing and a photograph of the carved side of Yaxchilán Lintel 25. Rubbing
by Merle Greene Robertson, ß Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, 1995–2007, used with
permission. Photograph ß Trustees of the British Museum, used with permission.

Moreover, the rubbing presupposes and instantiates a kind of user, or ‘intra-

actant’ (Barad, 2007). The rubbing constitutes a subject viewing the monument’s
simulation at a distant and fixed viewpoint, as if it were an artwork on a museum
wall (the original lintel, I might add, hangs today in the British Museum). While the
photograph’s perspective is stabilized, the viewer can perceive the monument’s
dimensionality and perhaps more easily imagine experiencing it from a different
vantage point. This dimensional reduction and experiential reorientation is par-
ticularly problematic in the case of this and related Yaxchilán lintels, as they were
installed as stone ceilings in Structure 23 doorways (Josserand, 2007: 302–303). The
photograph and rubbing both betray the experience of the inscription by an actor
standing beneath. They also cannot accommodate the dedicational inscription on
the front edge of the lintel, which would have been visible to subjects on the plaza
in front of Structure 23. The lintel’s bottom and side surfaces signified through
spatially distinct indexical fields, potentially marking a boundary between subjects
standing inside and outside a royal house doorway.
The experiential trade-off revealed by contrasting the rubbing and photograph
exists despite the absence of any obvious technological ‘blackbox’ (Latour, 1987),
such as the camera, in the steps required to translate stone into inked paper. Each
of Robertson’s steps is traceable and characterized by contiguity between one
mediator and the next. Robertson placed the paper directly against the monument
and dampened it with a brush. She touched the ink and transferred it to the paper.
Watson 187

Through these embodied practices, she transformed the monument into a piece of
art and a scientific document. At this stage she did not require instrumental black-
boxes subsuming component actors – cameras’ mirrors, shutters, and lights. She
had not yet been cut from the scene, though the material contexts in which Maya
actors intra-acted with the inscription did not have to be considered.
Once the ink dried and the simulation became a definitive record, it could be
further transformed. Rubbings’ sizes replicate simulated monuments, with minor
deformations that attend the reduction of three dimensions to two. The bulk of
these simulations were archived in Tulane University’s Latin American Library.
But most users of Robertson’s rubbings do not consult the rubbings directly. They
consult facsimiled copies of Robertson’s photographs of the rubbings. It is these
mediated images – copies of photographs of rubbings of monuments – that circu-
late throughout the Mayanist community. Thus the Figure 2 rubbing is thrice-
removed from the monument, abstracted further than the twice-removed ‘direct’
photograph. A Latourian empirical account slowly and deliberately follows each
step of transformation, each remove.
While it is initially deferred, the camera becomes requisite to transforming
carved monuments and stucco walls into widely accessible actors. Rubbings are
both conservative and performative. They conserve, partially, the likenesses of
monuments vulnerable to damage, as they perform, partially, new modes of his-
torical attachment. Rubbings, Robertson, and the camera intra-actively produced a
tertiary form, a photograph that could be reproduced, digitized, and manipulated.
Photographs further deform and reform rubbings. The constraining conditions of
photographic media are especially apparent in digital photographs, as their pixil-
ation turns rubbings into artifacts of technological pointillism. Here we are far
from carved stone.
The savviness of Robertson’s techniques did not issue from evading blackboxes
such as the camera. It issued from the power of the rubbing technique to counteract
a particularly loathed artifact in ‘direct’ photographs, shadowing that obscures
some lines and features while revealing others. The rubbing’s reduction of the
monument to two dimensions permitted Robertson to avoid photographs with
shadowing. While this may seem to maximize an image’s verisimilitude, it evades
the possibility that shadows might remind viewers that the image is the product of a
singular instant, the photographic encounter (cf. Raffles, 2010: 28–29). Through
‘mechanical reproduction’ (Daston and Galison, 2007), Robertson’s photographed
rubbings could circulate as more abstract and detached simulations than even
‘direct’ photographs. They became detached not only from monuments but also
from rubbings themselves, blackboxed on 920 linear feet of archive shelving
at Tulane.
Robertson’s Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute maintains a digital archive
of Robertson’s rubbings online at www.mesoweb.com. Anyone with internet access
can further transform the rubbings, multiply mediated partial connections to
ancient Maya experiences. We can download, view, print, cut up, and manipulate
Maya hieroglyphs and imagery. This creative presenting of the Maya past enables
188 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

countless acts of further translation through situated, affective encounters with

each archaeological ‘factish’ (Latour, 2010; Stengers, 2010, 2011), a product at
once fact and fetish, real because of its material construction. Such images
reduce the ancient Maya to a product that individuals can consume flexibly
and at a distance. In recognizing their status as factishes, perhaps we can begin
to intra-act with images in ways that displace structures of consumerist, imperial,
or neoliberal consumption, designing new modes of coexisting today with the
always-mediated ancient Maya.

Linda Schele’s drawings

Thompson’s and Robertson’s techniques preconditioned decipherment, a set of
knowledge practices developed, in part, by Schele and her colleagues. In this
final analysis I focus on how Schele shaped the contemporary image of Maya
objects through skillful, embodied manipulation of hieroglyphs. Drawings evidence
artists’ specific encounters with inscriptions in situated experiential fields. The art-
ist’s imagination is shaped by preceding experiences that render ambiguous forms
visible as hieroglyphic units of meaning. In this sense, drawing hieroglyphs is a
theory-laden act of interpretation.
Schele’s drawings have played major roles in the epigraphic re-staging of the
ancient Maya for professional and amateur witnesses. Almost 1000 of Schele’s
glyph drawings are – like Robertson’s rubbings – accessible via the internet, digit-
ally archived by the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies,
Inc. (www.famsi.org), or FAMSI. The original drawings have been bequeathed to
the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas-
Austin. Thus, actors involved in producing and simulating Schele’s drawings
have rendered these objects actionable and consequential at a distance from ori-
ginal inscriptions and original simulations.
Schele was a painter and art instructor before becoming a Mayanist in the early
1970s. Artistic training enabled Schele to develop powerful techniques for
re-inscribing hieroglyphs. On the FAMSI website two introductions to the virtual
collection provide crucial information for understanding her drawing techniques
and FAMSI’s digitization techniques. In his introduction, Peter Mathews (2003)
praises Schele’s drawings: ‘When combined with her intimate knowledge of imagery
and hieroglyphs, her skills as an artist enabled her to create simultaneously beautiful
and accurate records of the monuments and objects from the Mesoamerican world
she loved.’ This ‘intimate knowledge’ emerged through Schele’s careful study of
Thompson’s catalog, her work imaging monuments with Robertson at Palenque,
her collaborations with many scholars including Mathews and Lounsbury, and her
distinctive artistic talents. Together these factors transformed how we know and
experience hieroglyphs and the ancient Maya today.
Mathews (2003) provides a useful summary of Schele’s drawing techniques. She
rendered drawings with Mylar drafting film. During the 1970s and 1980s she
employed drafting pens and China ink, and by the 1990s she had transitioned to
Watson 189

felt-tipped pigment liner pens. Mathews (2003) adds that she utilized pens that
could produce very fine lines, with thickness sizes ranging from 3x0 to 2 in US
drafting standards (0.25 to 0.60 millimeters). Such pens mediated Schele’s intra-
active production of simulations with high degrees of aesthetic precision. In his
introduction to the FAMSI Schele Drawing Collection, Matthew H. Robb (2003)
offers additional detail concerning the digitization of drawings. They were photo-
graphed using 35-millimeter slide film to produce white-on-black negatives.
FAMSI scanned the negatives and adjusted and compressed the digital images
for virtual reproduction (e.g. Figure 3).
Thus, we can follow the chain of partial equivalences entailed in making hiero-
glyphs and images originally rendered with paint or stone into paper or pixels. As
I have noted, Robertson’s lithographic images do not directly simulate monumen-
tal referents. They productively reduce the objects’ complexity, dimensionality, and
sensual materiality. This abstraction imbues them with scientific sense and legibility
in material-semiotic fields distant from Maya monuments. Schele’s intricate and
remarkably accurate drawings enacted similar reductions, particularly the transla-
tion of three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images.
Yet the two series of translations differ substantially. Robertson’s rubbings
required a series of direct material contiguities. In the stead of material practices
bringing mediators into direct contact, Schele’s drawings entailed a spatial distan-
cing of the artist and her tools from the simulated objects. The artist’s perception
and bodily self-regulation mattered more in Schele’s freehand drawings than in
Robertson’s rubbings. Drafting and redrawing inscriptions from original objects or
images (including rubbings) requires considerable precision. It entails a competence
that re-instantiates multiple forms of knowledge. Mathews’ (2003) introduction to
the Schele Drawing Collection clearly makes reference to the conjunction of these

Figure 3. The Tablet of the 96 Glyphs from Palenque. Drawing by Linda Schele, ß David
Schele, courtesy of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies,
Inc. www.famsi.org.
190 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

skills. Producing highly accurate line drawings required embodied aesthetic know-
ledge of the symbols employed as well as artistic talent (see Coe and Lebrun, 2005).
Given that much of Schele’s prerequisite knowledge emerged through exhaustive
study of Thompson’s catalog, scholars today may wish to question how her draw-
ings evidence the (conscious or unconscious) use of Thompson’s abstract types as
paradigms resolving the empirical ambiguity of particular signs’ forms.
A major challenge of simulating inscriptions by hand is discerning how to parse
intricate intersecting lines and shapes. Although drawings are invoked as evidence
for specific interpretations, they are shaped heavily by producers’ ideological and
interpretive dispositions. Prerequisite embodied knowledge includes the established
conventions for drawing hieroglyphs that predecessors have employed (esp.
Graham, 1975; Lebrun, 2005: 18–19; Thompson, 1962). These ‘techniques of
the body’ (Bourdieu, 1980; Mauss, 1973[1935]) entail cutting hieroglyphs from
co-actors in their fields of association, including architecture, imagery, and envir-
onmental actors. Perhaps even more important to drawing hieroglyphs is the cap-
acity to distinguish elements internal to hieroglyphic signs. Such parsing is a
performative act rendering hieroglyphs as useful factishes for epigraphic research.
Drawing hieroglyphs is not an act of ‘mechanical reproduction’, as in
Robertson’s rubbings. Like Thompson’s catalog, it conforms closely to what
Daston and Galison (2007) term ‘trained judgment’ and identify as a virtue of
twentieth-century science. Daston and Galison (2007: 311, emphasis in original)
identify the shift from mechanical reproduction to trained judgment as a compen-
sation for the partialities of mechanical imaging:

Slowly at first and then more frequently twentieth-century scientists stressed the neces-
sity of seeing scientifically through an interpretive eye; they were after an interpreted
image that became, at the very least, a necessary addition to the perceived inadequacy
of the mechanical one.

The rise of trained judgment attended the growing prominence of psychology and
concern with the unconscious in the early twentieth century. An intensifying scientific
trend was to perceive advances as results of the interplay between willfully patient
empiricism and machinations of the unconscious, that source of ‘aha! moments’ which
line the pages of Schele’s popular publications (esp. Freidel et al., 1993) and public
workshops (see Watson, 2012). Travelers, antiquarians, and Mayanists have
employed variably trained degrees of judgment in distinguishing shapes and forms
of hieroglyphic inscriptions since the late-eighteenth century (cf. Thompson, 1927).
But it remains significant that Schele’s popular discovery narratives (esp. Freidel et al.,
1993) revel in unconscious activity to a perhaps unprecedented degree.
Schele’s trained judgment entailed carefully building on and diverging from
predecessors. Schele’s finely tipped pens were crucial technological allies for her
divergences, mediating the production of equivalences between stone artifacts and
paper-and-ink simulations. Accurate line drawings require high degrees of calli-
graphic precision. The width of lines defining boundaries between elements is
Watson 191

highly consequential. This particularly matters for monumental limestone carvings

that do not have boundaries of finite thickness, and instead employ curves of
differential relief, a topological play of depth elided in drawings. Thus, when simu-
lating a carving as a line drawing, Schele continuously made judgments regarding
relative boundaries of semantically significant lines. The use of such finely tipped
pens reflects not just a degree of precision, but also a degree of discretionary con-
fidence concerning how to marshal qualities of ancient and often highly damaged
objects, scrupulously simulating these qualities in a new matter and form.
Schele’s located and embodied techniques of judgment helped to materialize
hieroglyphs as intelligible linguistic units. Embedded in these aesthetic practices
were interpretive positions. Schele sometimes drew hieroglyphs and scenes
inscribed into the same lintel as separate images. The ability and choice to cut
hieroglyphs from associated images implicitly justifies prioritization of epigraphic
techniques in understanding the ancient Maya. It implies that glyphs were intelli-
gible independent of material associations and interplay between hieroglyphs and
scenes, which include both secondary texts and Maya elite figures wearing hiero-
glyphic signs (Bassie-Sweet, 1991). To become legible today, in the absence of
language ideologies and indexical fields integral to their original senses, hieroglyphs
had to be cut free and reassembled anew.

Conclusions
Thompson’s, Robertson’s, and Schele’s images play intertwined roles in Maya
historical knowledge production. Epigraphers deploy Thompson’s types and
manipulate Schele’s drawings to inspire new readings. These readings ground inter-
pretations of the cultural significance of monumental tablets that Robertson
imaged. The power of such historical imaging practices resides in how they are
cut from the embodied, located subjects who produced them (when not distracted
by gastric juices). Simulated hieroglyphs and monuments substitute for a world
that has – in only some ways – crumbled into fragments and dust.
Images of artifacts, features, and sites can be evocative mediations of past
worlds. Archaeologists increasingly employ digital media to produce virtual
worlds staging new modes of witnessing and consuming mediated pasts (e.g.
González-Tennant, 2013; Morgan, 2009). Even three-dimensional virtual worlds,
however, emerge through material practices and condition located encounters with
simulations as newly constituted artifacts. Edward González-Tennant suggests that
digital archaeological reconstructions can function as technologies for democratiz-
ing historical knowledge. We should remember that democracy is messy, complex,
and slow (Latour, 2004), and it requires violent exclusions (Watson, 2011). But we
cannot allow the non-innocence and partiality of representation to reduce us to
epistemological paralysis, and the explicit, apparent status of virtual worlds as
factishes inclines me to think that they might be effective models for archaeological
imaging practices productive of new modes of coexisting with, or simply improving
public engagement with, the always-mediated past.
192 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

My account of material and empirical practices that give rise to images of Maya
glyphs, ostensibly simpler archaeological factishes, serves as both a test case and
cautionary tale for archaeologists. The conditions of an artifact’s or site’s con-
sumption through specific media constrain how we think the past, and perhaps
with as much force as any epistemological or theoretical orientation. Thus, archae-
ologists should be as explicit as possible about their techniques of imaging and
simulation.
Attention to how practices of translation and cutting produce chains of partial
equivalences between objects rendered in different media means broadening the
terms of our empirical commitments, even experimenting with a radical or
‘second’ empiricism (Latour, 2011: 305). In Maya hieroglyphic studies, this broa-
dened empiricism means recognizing that re-inscriptions of hieroglyphs in media
designed for late-modern text – as in the cases of T-numbers, rubbings, and digital
images – introduces new constraints that may undermine the experience of complex
text-artifacts for both Maya specialists and publics, including attendees of popular
workshops that helped to solidify the near-hegemony of epigraphic knowledge
within Maya studies (Watson, 2012). The alternative is not to combat aesthetic
partial connections with ascetic retreat from the messiness of knowledge produc-
tion, or to purge archaeological and epigraphic work on images. It is, instead, a
matter of becoming more open, empirical, and experimental in narrating what is
lost in the production of equivalences, using texts rigorously as supplements.
I cannot presently discern how to generalize about everything cut, lost, excluded,
blackboxed, deferred, or occluded in reassembling Maya glyphs today. Cuts cut
specifically and deeply. They resist being ordered into classificatory boxes. But I
can discern that when we look at a simulation of Yaxchilán Lintel 25, including
each one ‘above’, we do not see a rough stone nearly dripping with humidity on the
ceiling above our heads, with dedicatory edge inscriptions beyond our immediate
view but accessible upon crossing the threshold between house and plaza. And
when we look at a drawing of the Tablet of the 96 Glyphs, we do not see how
finely carved lines of even depth evoke the scribe’s skills. And we do not and cannot
see the socially differentiated forms of ideology, collective memory (Gillespie,
2010), and affect felt by ancient Maya coming face to face – fleshy human face
to iconic stone face – with beings cut into that tablet. Maya hieroglyphs were texts,
yes, but they were not merely texts. One empirical challenge today is to resist that
reduction.

Acknowledgements
This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (Award
Number 0723636) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The
article would not have been possible without the careful guidance and attention of Susan D.
Gillespie. I also thank Florence Babb, Malini Johar Schueller, V. Betty Smocovitis, Lynn
Meskell, Lucas Martindale Johnson, the anonymous reviewers, and my anthropological
colleagues at North Carolina State University.
Watson 193

References
Baigrie B (ed.) (1996) Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems
Concerning the Use of Art in Science. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Baldasso R (2006) The role of visual representation in the scientific revolution: A historio-
graphical inquiry. Centaurus 48(2): 69–88.
Banks M and Vokes R (2010) Introduction: Anthropology, photography and the archive.
History and Anthropology 21(4): 337–349.
Barad K (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bassie-Sweet K (1991) From the Mouth of the Dark Cave: Commemorative Sculpture of the
Late Classic Maya. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Berlin H (1958) ‘El glifo emblema’ en las inscripciones mayas. Journal de la Socie´te´ des
Ame´ricanistes 47: 111–119.
Bourdieu P (1980) The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bowker GC and Star SL (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Burri RV and Dumit J (2008) Social studies of scientific imaging and visualization.
In: Hackett EJ, Amsterdamska O, Lynch M and Wajcman J (eds) The Handbook of
Science and Technology Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 297–318.
Cochrane A and Russell I (2007) Visualizing archaeologies: A manifesto. Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 17(1): 3–19.
Coe M and Lebrun D (2005) Interview with Linda Schele. Available at: http://www.
nightfirefilms.org/breakingthemayacode/interview.archives.htm (accessed November
2008).
Daston L and Galison P (1992) The image of objectivity. Representations 40: 81–128.
Daston L and Galison P (2007) Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
De Landa D (1994[c.1566]) Relación de las cosas de Yucatan. México, DF: Consejo Nacional
para la Cultura y las Artes.
Errington J (2001) Ideology. In: Duranti A (ed.) Key Terms in Language and Culture.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 110–112.
Freidel D, Schele L and Parker J (1993) Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the
Shaman’s Path. New York: William Morrow.
Gates W (1931) An Outline Dictionary of Maya Glyphs. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Gillespie SD (2010) Maya memory work. Ancient Mesoamerica 21(2): 401–414.
Gillespie SD (2011) Archaeological drawings as re-presentations: The maps of Complex A,
La Venta, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 22(1): 3–36.
González-Tennant E (2013) New heritage and dark tourism: A mixed methods approach to
social justice in Rosewood, Florida. Heritage and Society 6(1): 1–28.
Graham I (1975) Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions: Introduction to the Corpus.
Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University.
Hanks WF (1990) Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Haraway DJ (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege
of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.
Harding S (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Harman G (2009) Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. Melbourne: re.press.
194 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

Houston SD (2000) Into the minds of ancients: Advances in Maya glyph studies. Journal of
World Prehistory 14(2): 121–201.
Houston SD, Chinchilla Mazariegos O and Stuart D (eds) (2001) The Decipherment of
Ancient Maya Writing. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Jones A (2001) Drawn from memory: The archaeology of aesthetics and the aesthetics of
archaeology in earlier Bronze Age Britain and the present. World Archaeology 33(2):
334–356.
Jones CA and Galison P (eds) (1998) Picturing Science, Producing Art. New York:
Routledge.
Josserand JK (2007) The missing heir at Yaxchilán: Literary analysis of a Maya historical
puzzle. Latin American Antiquity 18(3): 295–312.
Kelley DH (1976) Deciphering the Maya Script. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Knorosov YV (1952) Drevniaia Pis’mennost’ Tsentral’noi Ameriki [Ancient writing of
Central America]. Sovietskaya Etnografiya 3(2): 100–118.
Knorosov YV (1958) The problem of the study of the Maya hieroglyphic writing. American
Antiquity 23(3): 284–291.
Kurbjuhn K (1989) Maya: The Complete Catalogue of Glyph Readings. Kassel: Schneider
and Weber.
Latour B (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour B (1988) The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour B (1990) Drawing things together. In: Lynch M and Woolgar S (eds) Representation
in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 19–68.
Latour B (1999) Circulating reference: Sampling the soil in the Amazon Forest. Pandora’s
Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, pp. 24–79.
Latour B (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour B (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Latour B (2010) On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Latour B (2011) Reflections on Etienne Souriau’s Les diffe´rents modes d’existence.
In: Bryant L, Srnicek N and Harman G (eds) The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press, pp. 304–333.
Lebrun D (2005) Interview with Ian Graham. Available at: http://www.nightfirefilms.org/
breakingthemayacode/interviews/GrahamTRANSCRIPT.pdf (accessed October 2012).
Lefèvre W (ed.) (2003) The Power of Images in Early Modern Science. Basel: Birkhäuser.
McAllister JW (2002) Recent work on aesthetics of science. International Studies in the
Philosophy of Science 16: 7–11.
Macri MJ and Looper MG (2003) The New Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs, Volume One: The
Classic Period Inscriptions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Malinowski B (1994[1923]) The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In: Maybin J
(ed.) Language and Literacy in Social Practice. Tonawanda, NY: Open University Press,
pp. 1–10.
Mathews P (2003) About the Linda Schele drawings. Available at: http://www.famsi.org/
research/schele/bypmathews.htm (accessed March 2010).
Watson 195

Mathews P and Schele L (1974) Lords of Palenque – the glyphic evidence. In: Robertson
MG (ed.) Primera Mesa Redonda de Palenque: A Conference on the Art, Iconography, and
Dynastic History of Palenque. Pebble Beach, CA: Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute,
pp. 63–75.
Mauss M (1973[1935]) Techniques of the body. Economy and Society 2(1): 70–88.
Morgan CL (2009) (Re)Building Çatalhöyük: Changing virtual reality in archaeology.
Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress 5(3): 468–487.
Morley SG (1946) The Ancient Maya. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Moser S (2012) Archaeological visualization: Early artifact illustration and the birth of the
archaeological image. In: Hodder I (ed.) Archaeological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity
Press, pp. 292–322.
Proskouriakoff T (1960) Historical implications of a pattern of dates at Piedras Negras,
Guatemala. American Antiquity 25(4): 454–475.
Raffles H (2010) Insectopedia. New York: Pantheon.
Robb MH (2003) About the Linda Schele drawings. Available at: http://www.famsi.org/
research/schele/bymrobb.htm (accessed March 2010).
Robertson MG (2006) Never in Fear. San Francisco, CA: Pre-Columbian Art Research
Institute.
Schele L (1982) Maya Glyphs: The Verbs. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Schele L and Mathews P (1998) The Code of Kings: The Language of Seven Sacred Maya
Temples and Tombs. New York: Scribner.
Schele L and Miller M (1986) The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. Fort
Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum.
Schieffelin BB, Woolard KA and Kroskrity PV (eds) (1998) Language Ideologies: Practice
and Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shapin S and Schaffer S (1985) Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the
Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Silverstein M (1979) Language structure and linguistic ideology. In: Clyne PR, Hanks WF
and Hofbauer CL (eds) The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels.
Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 193–247.
Smiles S and Moser S (eds) (2005) Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image. Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Stengers I (2010) Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stengers I (2011) Cosmopolitics II. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Strathern M (1991) Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Strathern M (1996) Cutting the network. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3):
517–535.
Stuart D (1993) Historical inscriptions and the Maya collapse. In: Sabloff JA and
Henderson JS (eds) Lowland Maya Civilization in the Eighth Century A.D.: A
Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 7th and 8th October (1989). Washington, DC:
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, pp. 321–354.
Swogger J (2000) Image and interpretation: The tyranny of representation? In: Hodder I
(ed.) Towards Reflexive Method in Archaeology: The Excavations at Çatalhöyük
Cambridge: McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research and the British Institute
of Archaeology at Ankara, pp. 143–152.
Thompson JES (1927) The elephant heads in the Waldeck manuscripts. Scientific Monthly
25(5): 392–398.
196 Journal of Social Archaeology 13(2)

Thompson JES (1950) Maya Hieroglyphic Writing: Introduction. Washington, DC: Carnegie
Institution of Washington.
Thompson JES (1962) A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Tucker J (2005) Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science. Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Watson MC (2011) Cosmopolitics and the subaltern: Problematizing Latour’s idea of the
commons. Theory, Culture and Society 28(3): 55–79.
Watson MC (2012) Staged discovery and the politics of Maya hieroglyphic things. American
Anthropologist 114(2): 282–296.
Winter IJ (1998) The affective properties of styles: An inquiry into analytical process and the
inscription of meaning in art history. In: Jones CA and Galison P (eds) Picturing Science,
Producing Art. New York: Routledge, pp. 55–77.
Wylie A (2004) Why standpoint matters. In: Harding S (ed.) The Feminist Standpoint Theory
Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies. New York: Routledge, pp. 339–351.
Zimmermann G (1956) Die Hieroglyphen der Maya-Handschriften. Hamburg: Universität
Hamburg Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiet der Auslandskunde.

Author Biography
Matthew C. Watson is a Latin Americanist anthropologist of science appointed as a
postdoctoral teaching scholar in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology
at North Carolina State University. His recent ethnographic and archival research
presents the first intensive analysis of Maya hieroglyphic decipherment as a public
and postcolonial science. He has published essays in American Anthropologist and
Theory, Culture and Society, and he is currently developing a manuscript titled The
Late Linda Schele: A Book.