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Wednesday, February 2, 1994 - North Shore News - 38

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Expert explores Mayan cosmos during evening lecture at the Orpheum

LEADING MAYANIST Dr.
Linda Schele, a professor of
art history at the University of
Texas, was a member of a
team of scholars that recently
deciphered the Mayan hiero-
glyphic code.

By Michael Becker
News Reporter

Her latest book, Maya Cosmos,
Three Thousand Years on the
Shaman's Path, recreates the
ancient Maya world view by bring-
ing together archacological and
anthropological research and his-
torical information from Maya
glyphs.

Schele is in Vancouver tonight
at the Orpheum Theatre for a 7:30
p.m. lecture on the Maya world
view. The event is the fifth lecture
presented as part of the 1993-94
Science, Technology. and Society
Lecture series presented by the
Portland-based Institute for
Science, Engineering and Public
Policy. :

Tickets are available through
Community Box Office by calling
280-2801.

. Schele recently spoke with the
News from Austin.
News: Can you describe some of
the challenges faced in figuring
out the Maya hieroglyphic code?

Dr. Schele: “The primary one is
that you are dealing with the writ-
ing system of a cultural tradition
that first of all is outside of our
own cultural past.

Photo submitted

DR. LINDA Scheie, a world-famous Mayanist, will be at the Orpheum Theatre
tonight to focus on the way the ancient Maya understood the world. She will com-
pare their world view to modern science and politics.

“ty would be as if Russian or
Chinese scholars a thousand years
from now tried to understand
Shakespeare by knowing 20th cen-
tury English.

“We're dealing with something
that is essentially alien. The other
thing is that the particular society

that wrote this had already col-
lapsed by around 900 AD which
was about six hundred years before
the Spanish came.

“On top of that, although the
writing was still in use when the
Spanish came. there was a system-
atic program to wipe out literacy.”

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News: How did you feel when
everything began to click in
terms of understanding the Maya
writing?

Dr. Schele: “The real big break-
throughs came in the 1950s and
1960s and the acceleration came in
the 1970s, I’ve been involved in it

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for 20 years and it will go on,

“It has been a ride of the most

amazing exhilaration and fun, How
many times in the history of the
world do people have the privilege
of participating in the recovery of
lost history?"
News: In some of the literature
I've read about you, you said
that you had to learn to think
like a Maya. What does that
entail?

Dr. Schele: “It’s impossible to
learn to think like someone from a
different cultural tradition. What
people can do is try to neutralize
their own cultural biases

“Many archaeologists think that
the best way to understand what
went on in the past is through mod-
ern science: that we look at it from
an outsider’s point of view.

“Those of us who are historical
cpigraphers, have always been
more interested in finding out how
these people saw the world and
how they understood it.

“The best way to get at that is

find out what they said about il. In
the long run you combine the sci-
entific detached perspective of
archacology with the internal view
that they provided us with their
own work,”
News: Can you tell me about
some of the chief cultural attrib-.
utes from the Precolumbian era
that still exist with the modern
Maya today?

Dr. Schele: “This is not some-
thing that is specific just tothe
Maya, but it's something that's at

See History page 36