Dr Adrian Chase

speaker

354 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Dr Adrian Chase’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Dan Snow's History Hit · The Rise of the Ancient Maya · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

Oh, I'm doing very well.

How about you?

Sure.

So here, this is the primary altar that's giving us a lot of the history here at Karakol.

And you can see, if you look at the middle, it's pretty rough.

It's a little broken up.

But even with that, you can still see all of these little glyph blocks.

Usually there's a key glyph that tells you start here, and then they give you a date, which is usually five glyphs.

So the Maya, when they make these glyphs, they're actually mixing together images representing words and sounds, but also they have a syllable.

So it's logosyllabic, and then every individual scribe can have their own style.

So there get to be different styles per site.

In terms of the written language, it seems like there are three used for most of the classic period with different variants to the east, to the west, and to the north.

And it's only been quite recently that you guys have been able to decipher these.

Yeah, so I'd say it's sort of the 1960s to present.

Even today, we can't read all of the glyphs.

So in some of these monuments, like you can see right over there, you might see a figure represented, and sometimes they have a glyph on their thigh or on their person, which is telling you that's their name.

Or sometimes you'll see a glyph for fire inside a fire.

And so little hints like that have led to this slow process of translating.

So yes, if you can get a nice glyphic text, it's quite useful.

But the thing is the Maya on these texts, there are all these stone monuments.

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