March 14, 2026 Martha Macri, Professor Emerita University of California-Davis: “The Isthmian Script: A New Approach to Decipherment.“
The Isthmian (Epi-Olmec) script is a Mesoamerican writing system, first brought to scholarly attention through inscribed texts on the Tuxtla Statuette and the La Mojarra Stela both discovered in Veracruz, Mexico. The Isthmian Script: Deciphering Ancient Mesoamerican Writing challenges a previous claim of full decipherment announced in Science in 1993, and provides the most comprehensive account ever given of this ancient script and the tantalizing clues it holds for pre-Mayan culture. Through structural analysis and comparative iconography, linguist Martha J. Macri demonstrates that the Isthmian script, even without a word for word decipherment, affords a wealth of data about the origins of Mesoamerican scripts and about interactions between Mixe-Zoquean and Mayan speakers during the Middle to Late Preclassic period (900 BCE–100 CE).
By providing data in support of any hypotheses, along with clear statements about what is still not known, Macri offers observations on specific signs as a starting point for additional productive research. The Olmec culture of the Gulf of Mexico, among the oldest known in Mesoamerica, clearly inspired the artistic motifs and iconography of the region. Evidence from sculptural traditions farther to south, however, suggests that the Isthmian script proper originated in Chiapas and Guatemala, not in the Olmec centers of San Lorenzo and La Venta.
With valuable new insights into the linguistic prehistory and the images carved on stone sculpture in Mexico and Guatemala, Macri’s work calls for a new generation of investigators into the Isthmian script, and inspires a renewed interest in the process of script invention in Mesoamerica.
Martha J. Macri is Professor Emerita of Native American Studies, University of California, Davis and Research Professor in Linguistics. She is a resident of Anacortes, WA.
Macri is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. As the first Yocha Dehe Endowed Chair in California Indian Studies, 2007–2013, she worked extensively on language revitalization with Native students at Davis and with several Native California communities. For many years she directed the J. P. Harrington Database Project, funded by NSF.
She began the Maya Hieroglyphic Database Project as a graduate student in linguistics at UC Berkeley in the mid 1980s, and has worked on it continuously since then. The database is now online, directed by Prof. Matthew Looper at Cal State Chico: https://mayadatabase.org/.
Macri’s most recent research reports can be found at http://glyphdwellers.com/. She is the author of The Isthmian Script: Deciphering Ancient Mesoamerican Writing.
She has four children, a dozen or so grandchildren, and several greatgrandchildren.
She is currently working on a book on the origin of writing in ancient Mesoamerica.
A recording of her talk is available for members at Meeting Archives.