How scribes of the ancient Maya pictured sound and meaning through inventive hieroglyphic writing that pulsed with vitality and wit

For two millennia, the ancestral Maya of Mexico and Central America created a rich legacy of image and text. Vital Signs is the first book to fully explain how this system worked, shedding new light on its design, intent, and authorship.

One of the few civilizations of the ancient world with hieroglyphic writing, the Maya developed an innovative form of visual representation in which written signs, known as “glyphs,” took their shape from pictures. In this extraordinary book, archaeologist and anthropologist Stephen Houston shows how recent decipherment of this system unveils a world where sacred kings and dynastic courts sought a way to affirm the truths that undergirded their authority and informed their cosmos. He explores how their scribes created vibrant, sometimes humorous glyphs and images saturated with esoteric messages that conveyed sound, movement, size, and scale. Houston covers a host of topics along the way, such as how Maya scribes depicted the ephemeral and configured artful space.

Drawing on more than four decades of research by one of the world’s leading scholars of these ancient writings, Vital Signs reveals larger human histories of how sounds might pass into the eyes, how the eyes can be coaxed to hear, and how static shapes were brought to life in the visual culture of the Maya.

Stephen Houston is the Dupee Family Professor of Social Science at Brown University. His books include The Life Within: Classic Maya and the Matter of Permanence, The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text, and (with Michael D. Coe) The Maya. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and Guatemala’s highest honor, the Order of the Quetzal.