SAA Annual Meeting 2026. Symposium: Knots, Glyphs, and Data: The Landscape of Modern Decipherment in the Ancient Americas
Chairs: Jeanette Nicewinter and Megan Leight

Lee, Sim and John Pedersen, The Learner’s Maya Glyph Guide (LMGG): A Central Resource for Intermediate and Advanced Learners of Maya Glyphs

Abstract: LMGG is a free website consolidating a substantial body of Maya epigraphic information in a single place. It is designed for learners who have exhausted the few introductory works and wish to continue expanding their knowledge, though researchers have also found it valuable. The information it holds is otherwise scattered across a multitude of academic works, recorded lectures, and documentaries. It is a web version of extensive notes—organized around individual Maya glyphs, words, and phrases—that Sim Lee has compiled and continues to develop. They include thousands of carefully curated examples of glyph forms that, along with structured commentary, aim to help learners identify and distinguish glyphs in their many forms. LMGG’s technology features include website infrastructure; a computed grid “index” to the notes on syllabograms, logograms, calendar-related glyphs, and phrases; automatic in-place links to all available works cited; relating the glyph entries to the two major Maya glyph classification systems (MHD and Bonn/Thompson) and the latter to each other; the ability to sort the glyph data in various ways; convenient presentation of transliteration-translations of selected real-world inscriptions; and providing a reasonable automated translation to Spanish (e.g., not translating logogram name CHUM to AMIGO).