Chapter II

, that practically the only advances made looking toward the decipherment of the glyphs have been on the chronological side. It is now generally admitted that the relative ages[238] of most Maya monuments can be determined from the dates recorded upon them, and that the final date in almost every inscription indicates the time at or near which the monument bearing it was erected, or at least formally dedicated. The writer has endeavored to show, moreover, {250} that many, if indeed not most, of the monuments, were "time markers" or "period stones," in every way similar to the "period stones" which the northern Maya are known to[239] have erected at regularly recurring periods. That the period which was used as this chronological unit may have varied in different localities and at different epochs is not at all improbable. The northern Maya at the time of the Spanish Conquest erected a "period stone" every katun, while the evidence presented in the foregoing texts, particularly those from Quirigua and Copan, indicates that the chronological unit in these two cities at least was the hotun, or quarter-katun period. Whatever may have been the chronological unit used, the writer believes that the best explanation for the monuments found so abundantly in the Maya area is that they were "period stones," erected to commemorate or mark the close of successive periods.

That we have succeeded in deciphering, up to the present time, only the calendric parts of the inscriptions, the chronological skeleton of Maya history as it were, stripped of the events which would vitalize it, should not discourage the student nor lead him to minimize the importance of that which is already gained. Thirty years ago the Maya inscriptions were a sealed book, yet to-day we read in the glyphic writing the rise and fall of the several cities in relation to one another, and follow the course of Maya development even though we can not yet fill in the accompanying background. Future researches, we may hope, will reconstruct this background from the undeciphered glyphs, and will reveal the events of Maya history which alone can give the corresponding chronology a human interest. {251}

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