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Learn more about Javier Urcid and his research on the ancient societies of Mesoamerica.
Fieldwork
Post Cards from the Past
Searching for pieces of an ancient puzzle
By Carrie Simmons
Tver the past twenty years, Javier Urcid has returned again and again to his native Mexico searching for pieces of an ancient puzzle.
An anthropological archaeologist and Brandeis associate professor of anthropology, Urcid studies the ancient societies of Mesoamerica and is working to decipher the writing system used by the Zapotec people of Oaxaca between 500 BCE and 900 CE.
Of the dozen or so known ancient Mesoamerican scripts, only the Maya and Aztec scripts have been deciphered, largely because of critical documents written by Spanish missionaries who interviewed native intellectuals. Although the Zapotec language is still spoken in Oaxaca, the script—one of the earliest known writing systems on the American continent—was replaced with another style of writing by the tenth century, well before European contact.
Without a key to unlock the script and only a few surviving texts, Urcid has traveled to Mexico time and time again over the course of two decades to known and unknown archaeological sites that bear inscriptions on monumental architecture and objects like ceramics and bones, attempting to contextualize them. His catalog of Zapotec glyphs contains almost three thousand entries with data about the signs, type, size, and form of material used—usually stone—as well as the context in which the inscriptions were found.
The biography of each inscription is complicated, Urcid says. Many hieroglyphic texts were carved on large, heavy stones placed in the façades and other parts of monumental architecture. But even in ancient times, people dismantled buildings and reused many of the monoliths in other places.
“Instead of providing a neat snapshot, the archaeological data leave me with a puzzle,” Urcid says.
Like Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Zapotec script was a logo-syllabic system of writing. A sign could represent a word or a single syllable of a word. Most of the signs were iconic. Some are identifiable as animals, plants, tools, or body parts like hands or feet used to convey an action, but many are icons that are unrecognizable today.
In his first book about the ancient script, Zapotec Hieroglyphic Writing, Urcid created contextual reconstructions of dismantled monuments. His reconstructions do not necessarily reflect the original placements of the inscriptions, but they do reveal clues about the writing system. Urcid discovered that some of the carved texts exhibit a pattern suggesting that the writing was syntactically structured, with a subject and an object, and that events were reported in terms of the native reckoning of time.
Using the catalog of glyphs, Urcid focused on those accompanied by numbers to elicit the structure of the ancient calendar, including day signs he decoded using a list of Zapotec day names compiled by a sixteenth-century Spanish missionary.
“Scholars had studied these glyphs before, but they couldn’t see the linkages because they never thought of them as comprising entire narratives,” says Urcid, a native of Puebla, Mexico, who joined Brandeis in 1999.
Although he can’t “read” the Zapotec script, Urcid has made some interesting conclusions about the societal uses of the ancient writing system.
“This society didn’t construe literacy as something to be accessed by everyone. It was monopolized by the elite and was a powerful means of marking social differences,” Urcid says. “However, it is also possible that there were different levels of literacy.”
Only trained readers could understand the components of inscriptions that coded speech, according to Urcid, but iconic components were semantically understood by people irrespective of their linguistic background, and were used on monumental buildings to transmit messages to a much larger social constituency.
One such inscribed monument from Monte Albán, one of the earliest cities of Mesoamerica, includes two royal figures engaged in a ritual, and a person dressed as an eagle presenting a captive. The blood sign “spoken” by the eagle-person denotes “sacrifice” of the captive, according to Urcid.
Tombstone inscriptions, murals on the walls of tombs, and markings on objects placed with the dead appear to be genealogical records that trace descent and document social status, according to Urcid.
“Writing was a way of validating access to resources like land and labor and legitimizing social status and administrative, political, and religious offices,” he says.
Urcid, who graduated from Universidad de las Américas in Cholula, Mexico, and earned a PhD from Yale University, is currently working on his second book, a history of Monte Albán. The history will be based on more than nine hundred Zapotec inscriptions collected at the archaeological site. More than four hundred of the carved monoliths appear to be records of important events that took place during the early occupation of the city between 400 BCE and 200 CE.
In addition to doing contextual analysis of inscriptions, Urcid has learned much about the Zapotec scribal tradition by studying other Mesoamerican writing systems, including inscriptions made by the Ñuiñe people. Urcid compares not only individual signs, but also their order, combinations, and relations to other signs within a given inscription.
In 2004, Urcid and a team that included two Brandeis students conducted an archaeological investigation of a large natural tunnel in Tepelmeme, Oaxaca, created by a stream. In ancient times, people visited the tunnel, which reaches heights of 210 feet in some areas, to render messages in Ñuiñe script. Like the complicated puzzle of monumental architecture with Zapotec inscriptions, the painted areas of the tunnel walls contain superimposed layers of inscriptions because of repeated use.
“There is a tendency in contemporary scholarship to refer to ancient Mesoamerica as ‘prehistoric,’ demonstrating a Eurocentric perspective of ‘history’ as memories rendered exclusively in Western alphabetic scripts,” Urcid says. “My work points to other possible ‘histories’ that are powerful means to foster contemporary social identities.”
Carrie Simmons is a university and media relations specialist in the Office of Communications.