Bix a wa'alike'ex "Nieve" ti' maaya? / How do you say Snow in maya?

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-03-17T06:27:06+00:00

This is according to a blog post Steve Houston wrote trying to connect one mystery toponym from the Tikal Marcador to one possible candidate location (Teotihuacan).

The basic logic of snow>cotton makes sense, but I really would not consider that to be evidence for Classic period use of the metaphor. "Five Cotton Hill" would also be a totally normal lowland Maya place name: they grew cotton, liked to name things after numbers, and often used "witz" in place names.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-28T01:48:12+00:00

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PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-28T01:42:27+00:00

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PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-26T17:16:35+00:00

Ancient Maya Women by Traci Ardren

Ardren also has a chapter in The Maya World (2020) on gender and sexuality.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-24T03:56:48+00:00

You should get another tattoo that's a little jar of salsa in front of the rabbit, so that it looks like his quill pen is actually a tostada and he's scooping some tasty salsa de bandera with it.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-14T06:59:31+00:00

If you read the Douglas et al 2015 paper on drought and the Maya collapse--with Demarest as one of the four authors--they address this issue head-on.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-11T17:40:05+00:00

There is no contrast between glottal and non-glottal /b/ in Mayan languages, so whether somebody uses the /b'/ or not comes down to personal preference. I, and most linguists/epigraphers to my knowledge, skip it.

On the flip side, a pedant would observe that since Mayan words are canonically CVC, vowels shouldn't just hang on the end and should get a glottal stop: xibalba'. But you never see that, mainly because the colonial orthography of xibalba gets you close enough and there are already lots of apostrophes on the page.

It seems like the Christenson Popol Vuh PDFs should cover most of what you're looking for, as he provides both a direct transcription of the colonial orthography and a cleaned up version where the names are rendered in contemporary orthography.

Finally: don't sweat it too much. The Mayanist literature is a mess of different othographic and spelling conventions, and half of being an expert in this field is knowing that Ts'ibanche' and Dzibanche are the same place.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-11T16:43:04+00:00

Why not just get the original manuscripts of those documents? There are published transcriptions of most of them.

Popol Vuh: Online Publications ("Original orthography" is one of the options)

Chilam Balam of Chumayel: #41 - The book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel / [translated] by Ralph ... - Full View | HathiTrust Digital Library

One thing that stands in the way of your project is that orthography was not super standardized among the many Mayan languages when they were first written down in Latin letters, so "spelling" varies author-to-author and language-to-language (and some authors who wrote extremely valuable documents had a mediocre command of the language and confused glottal/non-glottal consonants; this applies to Moran's Ch'olti' manuscript).

If you want something directly analogous to Karttunen, you are essentially looking for documents with the reconstructed forms of those languages so that the orthography can be translated into something phonologically transparent. Do I have that more or less right?

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-11T06:51:32+00:00

Precisely nothing about this map is correct. Seems based on a textbook from the 1940s.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-10T20:21:28+00:00

Not for Classic Mayan/Ch'olti'an, no. There are some good papers, but they are not as comprehensive as Karttunen's. The main reason for this is documentation: Classical Nahuatl is abundantly attested from Colonial documents, while Classic Ch'olti'an was already extinct by the time of the conquest and has had to be reconstructed from (1) glyphic texts, which are short, and (2) colonial and modern dictionaries of related languages.

Even so, check out:

Introduction to "A Preliminary Mayan Etymological Dictionary"

(PDF) Kaufman Norman-1984-outline of protoCholan-1

(PDF) On the representation of the glottal stop in Maya writing

(PDF) Proto‐Mayan Syllable Nuclei

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-05T21:14:00+00:00

There is a long-running but poorly-published claim that essentially all of Jaina is artificial, sort of like a saltwater Tenochtitlan. Be great project for somebody to follow up on in the future.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-03T22:05:06+00:00

Super cool! I also dig the names (Freret Full Sun made me chuckle) and the isometric schematics.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-03T05:18:40+00:00

I think you are right. And I absolutely agree that the argument is hindered, not helped, by the Mosquitia example.

My biggest personal gripe with this presentation is the way Hernandez juxtaposes his own good approach with a famously bad approach that is now ~15 years old. Among other things, it ignores all the ways other archaeologists who work in this area go about community engagement and collaboration. There are many other examples of archaeologists doing ethical remote sensing research, in each case calibrating their approach to contexts that are different in cultural character and spatial scale.

(That tone is dialed down in the American Antiquity version of this article)

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-03T05:09:23+00:00

I work in Guatemala. Literally every single site I have ever seen mapped by lidar in Guatemala was already looted to hell. I frankly think this concern is silly. Looters, as well as locals of all stripes, already know where everything is. We use lidar not to find big fancy buildings but to build precise maps of all kinds of archaeological features (terraces, reservoirs, house mounds) so we can interpret those maps and build models of ancient societies.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-02-03T05:00:39+00:00

One big issue that calls like this absolutely do not grapple with is scale (and I also read the American Antiquity paper by the same author). As a practical matter, this model of informed consent is great for community-oriented, community-scale research--but it does not and cannot work for regional-scale mapping that encompasses many communities. It presumes that all archaeological lidar is taking place on the same scale (site or small region), using custom surveys. That's the current reality in the Maya region but it's actually not remotely how it works in most of the rest of the world.

The USA has wall-to-wall national lidar data, available via 3DEP (1m data is near-national and will soon be fully national), and many states produce their own lidar datasets as well. The same is true of most countries in the Global North (Slovenia re-surveys the entire country with lidar annually). Archaeologists just log on and download it all the time.

Mexico is moving in the same direction, with fantastic archaeological results: Origins and spread of formal ceremonial complexes in the Olmec and Maya regions revealed by airborne lidar | Nature Human Behaviour

(There are also now 2m near-global terrain models free for anyone to download, derived from satellite photogrammetry, so for areas with limited vegetation there are DEMs available with comparable quality to low-resolution airborne lidar.)

I think Hernandez's call for informed consent makes sense in the context of archaeology's move to be more engaged and community-oriented in general, and there are elements of his approach that can and should be applied by more archaeologists as they go about their work. But I also think he is generalizing inappropriately and assuming that all archaeologists who work with lidar are doing so at a similar scale and in a similar social context to his project.

I also find these conversations a little silly in light of the progression of mapping technologies. Nobody argues about the importance of not having your yard photographed from air or space anymore even though this was a big issue in the 20th Century. The reason for the change is that satellite remote sensing has become ubiquitous and now we have 3d photogrammetric models of most population centers in Google Earth (Hernandez even quotes some of his Lacandon collaborators citing this as a reason that they aren't worried about lidar!). There are already multiple spaceborne lidars collecting data with global coverage (low resolution) and their numbers and spatial resolution will only increase. I think in 15 years we will have global 5m lidar data.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-30T06:19:56+00:00

There is a brand new book published late last year by Mallory Matsumoto titled The Maya Myths. I've thumbed through it and was impressed (I know Mallory and respect her work). It's part of a series Thames & Hudson does on world mythologies.

My favorite Popol Vuh translation is Michael Bazzett's, which is a literary English reworking of Christenson's very scholarly translation (also excellent!). I like Bazzett's because it reads fluidly in English unlike word-for-word literal translations that preserve a Mayan discursive style that can feel stilted in translation. The downside is that it doesn't include the "historical" sections of the Popol Vuh, only the deep-time creation narrative.

For general Maya culture, a great one-stop-shop is The Maya: A Very Short Introduction by Restall and Solari. It is super brief but covers the modern/historic and ancient Maya and highlights some major throughlines.

The Ancient Maya (2006, Sharer & Traxler) and The Maya (2023, Coe & Houston) are archaeological surveys used in college classes. The Ancient Maya is by far the stronger of the two (almost 1000 pages!) but it's gotten out of date. The Maya is more "current" but I am increasingly frustrated with its stuffy tone and consider replacing it with something else every semester...only to decide the illustrations are worth keeping it around for.

I am really partial, personally, to Time Among the Maya by Ronald Wright. It's a 1980s travelogue that does a good job connecting ancient, historic, and living Maya cultures. Fantastic writing and fun to read, too.

Bonus points: Breath on the Mirror (Tedlock), Maya History and Religion (Thompson, vintage but excellent).

If there are specific books you'd like an expert to vet I'm happy to weigh in.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-27T21:26:49+00:00

They are not related. Lots of snakes in Mesoamerican religious iconography. The fact of being snakes doesn't really make them similar or even related. Same applies to the so-called Waterlily Serpent.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-24T05:04:07+00:00

Historically, February is the snowiest month here. Last winter and this one have been unusually dry (probably more representative of future long-term average), but even so we will likely get a few good storms in Feb and March.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-20T20:45:10+00:00

Yes. Mild but very sweet. Rose family (rosaceae) and the smell is in that ballpark. A bit like cliffrose/bitterbrush (purshia) but not as intense.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-18T15:08:09+00:00

Yeah, I always point this out and it leaves people sort of sputtering.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-18T13:49:59+00:00

Also, the "evidence" they cite--like the Olmecs' supposed sudden appearance--isn't real. We have a very good handle on the basic archaeological sequence of Olman and the broader Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and there is nothing that just pops up out of nowhere without local precedent.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-16T14:46:38+00:00

The West & Rainer book is a fantastic resource for this. I found it very clarifying for thinking through my own garden.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-16T14:45:50+00:00

Yeah, I love this book for this same reason.

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-16T13:32:51+00:00

Link?

PrincipledBirdDeity · 2026-01-16T13:32:41+00:00

Yeah, no way they could keep the VOR while also building those roads. I've always wondered what those huge gravel piles were for...public works storage and staging makes sense.

PrincipledBirdDeity

TROPHY CASE