Workshop on a Workshop with ICE Fellow Anthony Aveni
Class of 1930 Room, Rockefeller Center
We focus on the exploration of the contents of Structure 10K-2, a tiny room in an abandoned building made over into a workshop by calendar scribes who inscribed tiny hieroglyphic texts and numbers over an extant mural painting, at the ninth-century ruins of the Classic Maya city of Xultun, Guatemala. This event emanates from collaborative work with MacArthur awardee Heather Hurst, who will present and interactively analyze replicas of the mural and texts she restored, and Franco Rossi, who will discuss the nature of the human remains he excavated beneath the floor of 10K-2 (he joins us from Germany via Skype). My own contribution, in collaboration with others on the team, will deal with the way the occupants of 10K-2 used the writing on the wall to forecast eclipses using methods unanticipated by Western astronomers—a lesson in scientific cultural diversity.
