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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Vital Signs: The Visual Culture of Maya Writing

Vital Signs: The Visual Culture of Maya Writing

Houston, Stephen

Hardcover

Art Criticism & TheoryNative American HistoryGeneral Latin American History

PREORDER - Expected ship date October 13, 2026

ISBN10: 0691285152
ISBN13: 9780691285153
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Oct 13 2026
Pages: 288
Language: English

How scribes of the ancient Maya pictured sound and meaning through inventive hieroglyphic writing that pulsed with vitality and wit

For two millennia, the ancestral Maya of Mexico and Central America created a rich legacy of image and text. Vital Signs explains how this graphic system worked, shedding new light on its design, intent, and authorship.

One of the few peoples of the ancient world with hieroglyphic writing, the Maya developed an innovative form of visual representation in which written signs, known as glyphs, took their shape from pictures. In this groundbreaking book, archaeologist and anthropologist Stephen Houston shows how recent decipherments of this system unveil a world where sacred kings and dynastic courts affirmed the truths that upheld their authority and underpinned the cosmos. He explores how scribes and sculptors created vibrant, sometimes humorous glyphs and images saturated with esoteric messages. Houston covers a host of topics along the way, such as how Maya artists conveyed sound, movement, size, and scale, thus expressing their deepest beliefs about transient things and meaningful space.

Drawing on more than four decades of research by a leading scholar of Maya civilization, Vital Signs reveals larger human histories of how the eyes could be coaxed to hear and static forms brought to life in the visual culture of the Maya.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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General Latin American History

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