Me as one of the Mayan pots from 600 to 900 BCE. Some are painted red and black. These are two colors that all early cultures have...black from the soot of the fire, red from clay. The "Mayan Blue" pot is painted after it has been fired. Some are incised also. This is the back room of the Peabody museum. I wasn't allowed to touch them...alas.

Take a good look at this image from the San Bartolo murals.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bartolo_(Maya_site). This is a repainted version created by Heather Hurst, who as an artist/anthropologist won the MacArthur Genius award for this project. This mural was created in 100 BCE and shows the self-sacrifice so necessary for men to appease the gods with their blood letting. The penis is pierced with spines from a long spined sea urchin. 

Women also self sacrificed by pulling cords studded with these spines through their tongue.

Elephant glyph? No, no elephants in Mexico...ever. But 19th century epigraphers read it as such.

I met Elise in Oaxaca 2 years ago. She's the teacher advisor for the Yale study of the "Mayan Cultures Across Time". So nice to be with my teacher-geek-love Mexico-group again. After studying how to "break the mayan code" I was able to write my name in Mayan glyphs (over my head on the board). This phonetic language took a while to decipher, mostly due to the prejudice of European scholars who just couldn't believe these little people could create a written language. "They" say there are only 5 orignal written languages. All others are derivations.

For years I've read National Geographic articles and art books written by mary Miller, dean of Yale's Art History dept... and here she is! We had a lesson on reading a "map" on deer skin that was a genealogy of a family in Mesoamerica.

A new journey

Well, I'm off again...