A Return From Mérida

Deb and I are back from a very successful trip from Mérida. Here’s some details on each task we hoped to complete.

The Ancient Maya App includes a drawing of Yaxchilan Stela 11 and an audio track about ancient Mayan writing. The app has audio tracks in three languages: English, Spanish and K’iche. Our first goal was to add Yucatecan Mayan audio. We needed to find a native Yucatecan speaker and then translate and record the script in this modern language. We made a good friend at Mérida’s Academia Municpal De La Lengua Maya. Maria from Tekom teaches at this schools. She is an expert in Yucatecan and was amazing to work with. Thanks to her we have a great recording of Stela 11 in Yucatecan.

Our second goal was to learn about how Mayan language is taught in Mérida. Thanks to the incredibly helpful Programas de Inmersión Cultural en Yucatán we meet with teachers, from universities to elementary schools to adult education. We’re grateful some many teachers helped us understand what tools might be useful in their classrooms. It was great to learn the glyphs from Professor Tokovinine we added to the app are very widely used, they sound like everyone’s favorite glyphs. Our talks about new app features and data sources were invaluable, they will drive development for the next year.

We visited one large and one small ancient Mayan site to understand if our app would be useful to guides and visitors. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Neither site had ancient Mayan text and no calendar dates in the long count system. In the northern Yucatán, artifacts with writing simply aren’t on the grounds of the archeological sites. At Uxmal they may have been present in the museum but the museum has been closed since the start of covid. We were told that artifacts with writing were more common in the sites in the southern Yucatán.

Finally, we hoped to learn if might remotely collaborate with friends in Mérida. The app has a lot of data and metadata. For example, it includes hundreds of glyphs. For each glyph from Professor Tokovinine’s handbook the app needs to know all its syllabic and logographic definitions, what category it is in (e.g., affix, bird, hand), if it can be rotated, etc. One doesn’t need to know how to program to create organized metadata for the app. Our idea is to collaborate on metadata creation with Maya experts via Google Spreadsheets. Essentially each spreadsheet would be like a database table holding one kind of information or information about a single artifact. Periodically we can export the spreadsheets to files and use them to create updated versions of the app. We tested the idea with Maria from Tekom and it worked extremely well. She is very experienced with these cloud based collaborative tools.

To develop a useful tool we need to deeply understand the users. Thanks to all those who shared their time and ideas with us!