By Jill Rice
A BYU archeologist was instrumental in debunking two scholars'' claims of deciphering inscriptions on an ancient mask from southern Mexico.
Stephen Houston, a BYU archaeologist, and Michael Coe, a retired Yale University professor, conducted a new study, published in the journal Mexicon, that disproves a previous claim about a writing system called Isthmian script.
As reported in the journal Science in 1993, two scholars said they had deciphered the writing system.
'I''m a bit skeptical about loud claims,' Houston said. 'So, I began to look closely at the arguments presented by these two scholars. It seemed obvious to me that the results were flimsy and unconvincing.'
Houston noted problems with the first attempted decipherment.
'The previous decipherment had none of the building blocks we had seen in other successful decipherments,' Houston said. 'With the discovery of this new mask, we took the step of ''plugging in'' the supposed values of signs into a fresh context and, not surprisingly, we found that it didn''t work at all.'
Researchers do not know who populated what is now Mexico and northern Guatemala prior to the Maya. Understanding the people''s way of life and system of government could help clarify their system of writing, though little is known about both of these areas.
' give us a feeling of context,' Houston said. 'There is a reciprocal process involved in decipherment; the greater the understanding of the inscriptions, the closer we are to frame expectations of context.'
Thousands of languages were spoken during ancient times, but only about 100 writing systems existed. Some of these writing systems remain undecipherable.
When translating a dead writing system, scholars need a 'bi-script,' or another known writing system that is somewhat equivalent to the unknown.
'These are the key,' Houston said. 'They allow us to go from the understood to the enigmatic, using details from the first to understand the second.'
Houston and Coe said the mask they analyzed further notes the improbability of a current translation of the Isthmian script. About 10,000 Mayan texts exist, but Isthmian is attested in only a handful of samples, so each new circumstance provides helpful and important opportunity for testing.
'This new mask is important because it adds significantly to the total corpus of texts in the Isthmian script,' Coe said. 'If someday a far larger body of texts should be discovered, or if a bilingual inscription in Maya and Isthmian should turn up -- which is highly unlikely -- then the text on the rear of the mask should tell us something significant about this lost civilization.'
The exact location of where the mask was found is unknown, as it is a part of a private collection. But Houston believes he knows when the mask was made.
'The mask was probably carved before the application of the text, although we can''t be sure,' Houston said. 'It was probably made between AD 200 and 500. We know this because a few of these masks have been found, archaeologically, and they appear on those grounds to date to that general time.'
Houston said the mask is important to the decipherment of the ancient language.
'It is one of the most precious documents of ancient American civilization,' Houston said. 'It allows us to evaluate claims that Isthmian writing has been deciphered.'