Cracking The Maya Code, Week 3 Post 1

"At the beginning of the film “Cracking the Maya Code,” the narrator poses a question: "Imagine explorers arriving to find our cities deserted. All of our books have perished in some unknown catastrophe. All that is left to speak for us are the written words we have carved in stone. The travelers could not make sense of our script. But if they could would they comprehend who we were?"


Consider this scenario with respect to the carved stones that appear in our society today—the Vietnam Memorial, Mt. Rushmore, the Lincoln memorial, artwork on campus, etc. Imagine that only a small handful of important books had survived, hidden away alongside these carved stones. How would our monuments and books speak for us? If they could understand our writing system, would future explorers be able to understand who we were?"

With only our written language and no one to speak it, it would be very difficult and near impossible to make any sense of our alphabet. Letters and numbers appear everywhere and are applied to every aspect of our lives. We do not use pictographic symbols or characters, which like the Mayan culture, in some instances assisted in the deciphering of their written language.

If these hypothetical explorers had been able to figure out our language, the question is then about our culture "would they comprehend who we were?". What were our values? Were we religious? Were we diverse or all the same? What did we eat?

With only the strongest of monuments left standing, would they be sufficient in detailing our society? I say no. A significant part of our society is our language and communication. Though everything is now written down, or typed, I still believe that oral history is a very important part of American society. We are also a very visual nation with the new age of booming technological advances. Our society in general is extremely fast paced with even the most basic elements: food, travel, education, etc.

However, I also think that our monuments would paint a fairly decent picture of some of what we value. For example, the war memorials clearly depict scenes of battle and carry a sense of respect and brotherhood. Presidential monuments are clearly respectful of the men that are carved inside of them (although I wonder if something such as the Lincoln memorial wouldn't give the wrong impression that we worshipped him as a god or something, architecturally the building does looks similar to temples in Greece).