Mediating the Maya: Hieroglyphic imaging and objectivity

Abstract

Drawing from the science studies literature on scientific visualization, this essay examines how techniques of imaging Maya hieroglyphs have established conditions that constrain contemporary scholars’ systems of historical imagination and interpretation. I discuss imaging techniques innovated by three significant Mayanists: J. Eric S. Thompson, Merle Greene Robertson, and Linda Schele. Building on the work of historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, I identify these Mayanist scholars’ techniques of visualization as established practices of ‘mechanical objectivity’ and ‘trained judgment’. These practices helped to reduce aesthetically complex and materially diverse ancient Maya inscriptions to the equivalent of modernist texts. I question this reduction, drawing from the work of Bruno Latour to advocate an empirical attentiveness to the located and embodied material practices that produce equivalences between objects rendered in diverse media: stone, paint, paper, and pixels. The essay thus calls for the extension of context-oriented archaeological empiricism to practices of image production.

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