Dr. James Fitzsimmons

And the thing is, it seems to, it was probably rude to actually watch the person chew their food.

And so it would have been even more uncomfortable.

Like you get invited to a feast, the ruler's sitting there with all their food and they're eating.

And you have all these people being like, oh gosh.

It would have been uncomfortable, yeah.

Yeah, so it's the same term here.

Hieroglyphs, so the Maihad hieroglyphs, the...

So one of the things that distinguishes Mesoamerica from much of, well, I think all the rest of the Americas is that they have writing systems.

So it's an urban area, and there are plenty of other urban areas in the Americas.

But for Mesoamerica, there's writing systems.

Everybody's got writing systems.

So the Aztecs have a writing system.

The Maya have a writing system.

The Olmec have a writing system.

Probably start writing, actually.

Zapotecs, Mixtecs, they all have writing systems.

And the Maya writing system, though, is, I would say, the most complete and most complicated writing system that the Americas ever produced.

And so we know we can read about, I don't know, 85% of the inscriptions, things of that sort now, in part because we had things like a Rosetta Stone to help sort of decipher them.

Oh, really?

Yeah, sort of.