2008 Symposium, Program

Scripts, Signs, and Notational Systems in Pre-Columbian America

Symposiarchs: Elizabeth Boone and Gary Urton
Dates: 11–12 October 2008
Venue: Music Room, Dumbarton Oaks

Saturday, October 11

• 8:30 am
• Registration and coffee on the Terrace
• 9:00 am
• Jan Ziolkowski (Director, Dumbarton Oaks),
  Joanne Pillsbury (Director of Studies, Pre-Columbian Program, Dumbarton Oaks), Welcome
• 9:15 am
• Elizabeth Boone (Tulane Univeristy)
  Introduction

Session I, Joanne Pillsbury, moderator

• David Stuart (University of Texas at Austin) The Role of Proper Names in the History of Mesoamerican Art and Communication
• Stephen Houston (Brown University) The More Things Change: Maya Writing Over Time and Space
• Oswaldo Chinchilla (Museo Popol Vuh, Universidad Francisco Marroquín) The Flowering Glyphs: Animation in Cotzumalhuapa Writing
• Javier Urcid (Brandeis University) The Written Surface as a Cultural Code: A Comparative Perspective of Scribal Traditions from Southwestern Mesoamerica
• Karl Taube (University of California, Riverside) Teotihuacan and the Development of Writing in Classic Period Central Mexico
• 1:15 pm
• Lunch in the Orangery (by subscription)

Session II, Gary Urton, moderator

• Alfonso Lacadena García-Gallo (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) Phoneticism in the Aztec (Nahuatl) Writing System
• Federico Navarrete Linares (Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Representations of Time-Space in Aztec Pictographical Histories and Monuments
• Michel Oudijk (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Elaboration and Abbreviation in Mexican Pictorial Registers: The Case of Origin Narratives
• Elizabeth Boone (Tulane University) Ruptures and Unions: Graphic Complexity in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
• Discussion
• 6:00–7:30 pm
• Reception

Sunday, October 12

Session III, Elizabeth Boone, moderator

• Margaret Jackson (Stanford Humanities Center) Moche as Visual Notation
• R. Tom Zuidema (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Emeritus) Chuquibamba Textiles, Calendars and Andean Administration
• Tom Cummins (Harvard University) Tocapu: What Is it, What Does it Do, and Why Is it Not a Knot?
• Gary Urton (Harvard University) Sign Communities and the Political Economy of Cord-Keeping in the Andes: 1000–1600 C.E.
• Frank Salomon (University of Wisconsin), (in collaboration with Carrie Brezine, Raimundo Chapa, Gino de las Casas, and Víctor Falcón Huayta), The Rapaz Khipu Patrimony in Long Chronology
• Discussion
• 12:55 pm
• Speakers' Photograph (meet on the Main House steps, North Vista)
• 1:00 pm
• Lunch in the Orangery (by subscription)