[Aztlan] Tools for working with history

[E.P. Grondine]

Buenos Noches, listeros

Michael E. Smith wrote: 

"Its too bad we don't have a journal or organization that brings people together."

Hi Mike, you're still thinking in the old paper/meeting paradigms to some degree. What I learned back when the Cambridge Conference was devoted solely to studying impacts (pre-2004) was that paper is slow. Furthermore, due to paper's costs and other considerations it nearly always is refereed, and if that referee happens to tenaciously hold some particular point of view, other data and theories will not get due hearing. Consider for example the recent discussion here on Aztec/Mexica. How many years would that have taken in paper?

Schele made her progress on Mayan by using personal meetings, where the communication is for all purposes instantaneous. Of course, the problem with them is transportation, lodging, facilities costs. Not to mention the need for a REALLY GIFTED MODERATOR.

(A long aside - For me now since my stroke, my brain does not work that fast, and I need time to formulate even such simple answers as I can. What little spanish I had pre-stroke has been severely affected, so machine translation sites are useful to me when reading spanish language messages here.)

If I were to suggest one thing to you, it is that translations to English of the standard Nahuatl works need to be made more commonly available, perhaps freely through the internet. One must remember that US government funded work on Mayan-English dictionaries preceded Schele et al's breakthroughs. I suspect that something similar may be required before the breakthroughs you seek come about.

Electronic forums such as this list are very good, but they lack the ability to share images, which is a real problem when working with glyph systems.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas