Time Line of Decipherment
1881
Photo documentation
Britain's Alfred Maudslay was a respected diplomat, but he would be
best remembered for his work as an amateur Mayanist. Fascinated by
scholars' writings on the Maya and by new advancements in
photography, Maudslay set out to create as complete a record as
possible of the civilization's architecture and art. Using a
large-format, glass-plate camera, he captured highly detailed images
of Maya sites, including clear close-ups of the glyphs (above). He
also prepared papier-mâché casts of several carvings
from which accurate drawings were later made. Maudslay had
effectively given Maya studies its first systematic corpus, or body,
of inscriptions. This helped make further decipherments possible, in
part by bringing glyphs to scholars who had limited access to the
few surviving Maya texts.