It is five o'clock on an early October evening. Students file into a large Sever Hall classroom and begin to study small, black and white, icon-like drawings printed on homemade flash cards.
Some students work together, comparing their cards and answering each other's questions.
An uninformed observer might wonder what is going on in this classroom, but to instructor David Stuart the answer is easy. Most students describe an abiding interest in the Maya based on prior travel, field work, or classroom study. Some have a linguistic interest in the subject, and one student cites his own Mayan heritage. But more than a few students credit the instructor, Dr. David Stuart, Lecturer on Anthropology and Associate Director of the Peabody Museum's Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphs Project, as their primary reason for enrolling. He is deeply involved in the last major writing decipherment problem in human history.