American Pie Script

[Geraldine Ferraiz]

Inthe bit it took me to think of a reply, a compressed version of the journey that had brought me to apply to be part of the Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau surged through my head. I thought of visiting the graduate program I would eventually choose to attend some twenty-five years ago as a prospective student. The sole Asian American professor on the faculty at the time advised me not to come because of the lack of support for Asian American studies. I committed to the program anyway. Some part of me knew, even if I could not articulate it then, that the path I needed to take involved the kind of learning I could do precisely because I would not be surrounded by like-minded people. I knew I would have to work hard to discover, and then communicate, why it was important to pursue the research directions I wanted to take, which was a challenge that I needed. I could hardly articulate to myself why my interests were of significance to anybody but myself. Historically, Asians have been a statistical minority in the United States. How was what I wanted to do different from mirror gazing?

My years of study showed me that what I first thought was a mirror was in fact a window looking out to the past. Asian Americans make up a small number of the U.S. population by legislative design, historically labeled as unassimilable aliens and a docile model minority, often (perplexingly) at the same time. Gatekeepers to America cast us as bit players, lucky to be invited, without apparent editing access to the entire complicated script that holds these American states united.

How does the weight of the past get felt by a single person? For me, I felt it in my formative years as a hard-to-articulate estrangement from the stories held up to me as ethical fables of how to be a good person and a good citizen. I felt as if I was asked to meld myself into America without being able to ask why America was shaped that way in the first place.

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Mesoamerica, along with Mesopotamia and China, is one of three known places in the world where writing is thought to have developed independently.[1] Mesoamerican scripts deciphered to date are a combination of logographic and syllabic systems. They are often called hieroglyphs due to the iconic shapes of many of the glyphs, a pattern superficially similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Fifteen distinct writing systems have been identified in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, many from a single inscription.[2] The limits of archaeological dating methods make it difficult to establish which was the earliest and hence the progenitor from which the others developed. The best documented and deciphered Mesoamerican writing system, and the most widely known, is the classic Maya script. Earlier scripts with poorer and varying levels of decipherment include the Olmec hieroglyphs, the Zapotec script, and the Isthmian script, all of which date back to the 1st millennium BC. An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script.

After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, Spanish colonial authorities and Catholic Church missionaries aimed to purge indigenous culture, religion and traditional institutions, which included the destruction of texts of Mesoamerican and pre-Colombian origin. However, some Mesoamerican texts were spared, particularly from the Yucatn of southern Mexico, recording the languages of the area. These surviving texts give anthropologists and historians valuable insight into the origins of Mesoamerican languages, culture, religion, and government. Languages recorded in Mesoamerican writing include Classical Maya, Classical Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec, and various other languages, particularly of the Oto-Manguean and Uto-Aztecan families.

Early Olmec ceramics show representations of something that may be codices, suggesting that amatl bark codices, and by extension well-developed writing, existed in Olmec times.[citation needed] It was also long thought that many of the glyphs present on Olmec monumental sculpture, such as those on the so-called "Ambassador Monument" (La Venta Monument 13), represented an early Olmec script. This suspicion was reinforced in 2002 by the announcement of the discovery of similar glyphs at San Andres.[3]

In September 2006, a report published in Science magazine announced the discovery of the Cascajal block, a writing-tablet-sized block of serpentine with 62 characters unlike any yet seen in Mesoamerica. This block was discovered by locals in the Olmec heartland and was dated by the archaeologists to approximately 900 BCE based on other debris. If the authenticity and date can be verified, this will prove to be the earliest writing yet found in Mesoamerica.

Another candidate for earliest writing system in Mesoamerica is the writing system of the Zapotec culture. Rising in the late Pre-Classic era after the decline of the Olmec civilization, the Zapotecs of present-day Oaxaca built an empire around Monte Albn. On a few monuments at this archaeological site, archaeologists have found extended text in a glyphic script. Some signs can be recognized as calendric information but the script as such remains undeciphered. Read in columns from top to bottom, its execution is somewhat cruder than that of the later Classic Maya and this has led epigraphers to believe that the script was also less phonetic than the largely syllabic Maya script. These are, however, speculations.

Zapotec scribes were conflated with artists and were often called huezeequichi, meaning 'an artist on paper'.[4] This suggests that writing may have developed out of an older artistic tradition, in which abstract concepts were represented with symbols, which later more concretely came to represent spoken language. The Zapotec developed a highly advanced 260-day ritual calendar, and a 365-day secular calendar from their knowledge in astronomy.

A small number of artifacts found in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec show examples of another early Mesoamerican writing system. They can be seen to contain calendric information but are otherwise undeciphered. The longest of these texts are on La Mojarra Stela 1 and the Tuxtla Statuette. The writing system used is very close to the Maya script, using affixal glyphs and Long Count dates, but is read only in one column at a time as is the Zapotec script. It has been suggested that this Isthmian or Epi-Olmec script is the direct predecessor of the Maya script, thus giving the Maya script a non-Maya origin. Another artifact with Epi-Olmec script is the Chiapa de Corzo stela which is the oldest monument of the Americas inscribed with its own date: the Long Count on the stela dates it to 36 BCE.

In a 1997 paper, John Justeson and Terrence Kaufman put forward a decipherment of Epi-Olmec. The following year, however, their interpretation was disputed by Stephen Houston and Michael D. Coe, who unsuccessfully applied Justeson and Kaufman's decipherment system against epi-Olmec script from the back of a hitherto unknown mask. The matter remains under dispute.

The Maya script is generally considered to be the most fully developed Mesoamerican writing system, mostly because of its extraordinary aesthetics and because it has been partially deciphered. In Maya writing, logograms and syllable signs are combined. Around 700 different glyphs have been documented, with some 75% having been deciphered. Around 7000 texts in Maya script have been documented.

Maya writing first developed as only utilizing logograms, but later included the use of phonetic complements in order to differentiate between the semantic meanings of the logograms and for context that allows for syllabic spelling of words.[5]

Two other potential writing systems of the pre-classic period have been found in Mesoamerica: The Tlatilco cylinder seal was found during the time frame of the Olmec occupation of Tlatilco, and appears to contain a non-pictographic script. The Chiapa de Corzo cylinder seal found at that location in Mexico also appears to be an example of an unknown Mesoamerican script.[6]

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