New Worlds: How Deciphering an Ancient American Script Opens a New Chapter in Comparative History

A key objective of this session is to shift perceptions of ancient history away from narrow antiquarianism to the study of the cultural “laboratories” that gave rise to the today’s world. Yet the latter was not equally true everywhere in the world. The Americas, together with many other places, saw their laboratory violently snuffed out by European expansionism, meaning that their pasts are not precursors to the “now” but rather a lost world of possibilities and potentials. Because of this they offer us a different way to reconceptualize and invigorate the notion of “ancient history” for the twenty-first century.

The decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing, realized only in the last few decades, has opened a wealth of new sources that have enriched and refined interpretations drawn from archaeological investigation. Unlike in the Old World, where archaeology was once a mere “handmaiden of history” but now challenges and sometimes overturns long-entrenched narratives with its upstart data from excavations, the inverse is true of the New World. The study of the ancient Americas, once a field of “prehistory” in which material analysis was the only viable means of investigation, must now accept and integrate the written word.

Gaining access to the history of even a single ancient American culture offers unique insights into the human condition. In the absence (as far as we can tell) of any cross-fertilization from the Old World, the commonalities we see in the New World speak to proclivities and cognitive pathways that are not situational but deeply structural. It is not an exaggeration to say that the complex societies of the ancient Americas represent an alternate experiment in living and thinking, one in which some trajectories may diverge, but more often (and intriguingly) offers strong parallels that are of relevance in many other contexts as well.