May 9, 2026 John Justeson, Professor Emeritus of the State University of New York at Albany: “Recovering a Zapotec Language from Hieroglyphic Texts.”
Zapotec hieroglyphic texts constitute the most ancient corpus surviving from ancient Mesoamerica. The most thorough and accurate documentation of these texts is Javier Urcid’s dissertation in 2001. Terrence Kaufman (1937-2022) and John Justeson collaborated on their linguistic decipherment. This talk explains Kaufman and Justeson’s analysis and results. As usual for decipherment in the absence of bilingual texts, a key vehicle for decipherment is patterned numerical data – in Mesoamerica, this normally means the recognition of calendrical patterns. Part of this talk is Kaufman and Justeson’s analysis of Zapotec calendrical patterns (informed by the extraordinary accomplishments of Javier Urcid) and related astronomical correlates, and correcting serious errors in previous analyses; these results will appear in the upcoming issue of Latin American Antiquity. Kaufman determined the grammatical patterns of words and sentences based on his reconstruction of proto-Zapotecan grammar and vocabulary; which enabled the texts to be read in Zapotec.
John Justeson is a linguistic and archaeological anthropologist specializing in Mesoamerican languages, hieroglyphic writing, and astronomy. He earned a BA in anthropology and probability theory at UC Berkeley (1972), a PhD in archaeology from Stanford (1978), and an MS in artificial intelligence from Stanford (1990). He taught linguistics at the University of South Carolina (1976-1980), and linguistics and statistics at the University at Albany, New York (1990- 2020). He benefited from research fellowships at Yale University (1978-79), Dumbarton Oaks (1981-82), Vassar (1984-86), and IBM’s Department of Artificial Intelligence (1988-90). With Terrence Kaufman, he directed a language documentation project in Veracruz, Mexico, training linguists to work with native speakers of 32 Mesoamerican languages (Mayan, Mixe-Zoquean, and Zapotecan) to compile dictionaries of their languages. With Kaufman, he used the results of this work to aid in the decipherment of the hieroglyphic writing in an earlier version of these languages. For comparative purposes, he has studied ancient languages and writing systems of the Old World, principally Sumerian, Elamite, Egyptian, and the Indus Valley.
Justeson presented at the Pre-Columbian Society on several occasions between 1996 and 2015. He has published 93 articles, most recently a reconstruction of the design and historical development of the Mayan eclipse table in the Dresden Codex (available for download at https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.adt9039).