January 20, 2024 Dr. Barbara MacLeod: “The Decipherment of T540 as K’IL and its Function in Counts to Solar Eclipses”
Dr. MacLeod presented the evidence for her reading of T540 as K’IL (cycle which has reached maturation), showed as many of its uses as time allows, and argued that in its three occurrences at Yaxchilan and in a single example from Quirigua, it represents a count of lunations back to a solar eclipse. These occurrences are embedded in the Fire Rituals of the Supplementary Series discussed by Nikolai Grube (2000) and by Guillermo Bernal Romero (2016). Among the many examples of Fire Rituals documented by these investigators, only the four featuring T540 present this relationship to solar eclipses as precise counts of completed lunations added to the current age of the Moon, employing the correlation constant 584285.
Dr. Barbara MacLeod, an independent scholar in Austin, Texas, has for more than four decades been an active contributor to Maya epigraphy and Maya cave archaeology, with numerous publications in these fields. She has a keen interest in reading recalcitrant Classic-period signs employing morphological and syntactic approaches to decipherment. She has long been interested in the nuanced mathematics within the Maya calendar and its use in archaeoastronomy. Her first publication in this regard was a chapter titled ”The 819-Day Count: A Soulful Mechanism” in Word and Image in Maya Culture: Explorations in Language, Writing, and Representation edited by William F. Hanks and Don Stephen Rice (1989).
Her most recent publication, co-authored with Luis Lopes and Alejandro Sheseña, is titled “Of Heat, Holes, and Hollow Places: The Semantics and Phonetic Value of T650” (Estudios de Cultura Maya LXII: 75-114 Fall/Winter 2023). She has several co-authored papers in review on the Naj Tunich cave system, on Piedras Negras Throne 1, and a monograph on T78:514, the most elusive and intriguing sign in the Classic script. Dr MacLeod received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Texas. For many years she worked as a full time instructor of primary and aerobatic flight in Austin, TX.