Dr. Rich Sandoval speaks about the language of calendars in Ancient Maya texts
Monday, February 16 | 3:30–5:00 p.m. | Hellems N253 & Zoom
CU Linguistics, Anthropology, and CNAIS welcome Richard A. Sandoval of Metropolitan State University of Denver for a lecture exploring how Ancient Maya scribes encoded time, cosmology, and social meaning through a richly multimodal calendrical language.
Dr. Sandoval’s talk examines the central role of calendars in Ancient Maya cosmology and sociocultural life, as evidenced by thousands of inscriptions in which calendar-date expressions figure prominently. These expressions were not merely numerical records: they were governed by a specific grammar, offered scribes multiple formal options for expressing a single date, and carried layered meanings tied to cycles of time, ritual force, and ancestral resonance. Numerals themselves participated in this semantic enrichment, appearing in multiple hieroglyphic forms—from iconic bar-and-dot notation to elaborate figural depictions of patron deities.
Moving beyond hieroglyphic writing alone, Sandoval argues that Maya calendrical expression extended into the visual and gestural domain. Drawing on recent work deciphering textual hand signs, he shows how depicted figures within Maya art encode dates and calendrical relations through their hands. These signs can harmonize local events with cosmological cycles and generate intentionally polyvalent expressions—texts designed to be experienced nonlinearly, mirroring the structure of time itself.
Dr. Sandoval, an alum of the CU Linguistics PhD program, is a linguistic anthropologist whose research centers on Indigenous communication traditions of the Americas, with particular attention to signed and multimodal language. His earlier work documented the integration of hand signs and speech in Arapaho storytelling; his current research brings this multimodal perspective to Ancient Maya texts, revealing a sophisticated scribal practice that unites hieroglyphs, gesture, and cosmological meaning.
The talk is open to all and will be offered in a hybrid format, with both in-person and Zoom attendance available.