A New Catalog and Quantitative Analysis of Copador Glyphs (2024)

Undergraduate: Ana Kisley

Faculty Advisor: David Mora-Marin
Department: Linguistics

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Glyphs found on Copador pottery vessels of Honduras and El Salvador have been termed pseudoglyphs (Longyear 1952) because they are unreadable as Mayan inscriptions. They have since been examined archaeologically (Alfaro Moisa 2013, Caballero Díaz 2017), but not linguistically. The goal of this project was to create an improved catalog of Copador signs and a record of inscriptions that could be used to investigate whether the structure of the inscriptions resembles a linguistic writing system. Initial findings show that some signs appear far more frequently than others and in reliable configurations. Notable comparisons can also be made between some signs and those in Mayan hieroglyphs, and between the signs and motifs in the vessels’ iconography. Most importantly, the catalog and corpus materials created during this project open up the possibility of doing statistical analyses of Copador texts. This was a preliminary project, but future research may reveal more about the structure and function of these texts.