Historical Markers and the Mystery of the Maya

I recently reread a book called, "The Chronicle of Maya Kings and Queens," which I enjoyed but also found frustrating. The past 20 years have been something of a Golden Age for Mayan archeology. There are significant on-going excavations at major and relatively recently discovered sites such as Caracol, not to mention old standards like Palenque and Chichen Itza. The text used by the classical Mayan civilizations has been deciphered and some names and events restored to history. Even so the picture is murky. For instance, we know a great deal more about the roughly contemporaneous reign of Charlemagne in France and Germany than about any Mayan King's reign.

This is partly a matter of European monastic chronicles not be subjected to active destruction that Mayan records on bark paper were. (Thanks a lot, Bishop Landa) However, part of the murkiness is a matter of random survival. I had the thought that the contemporary equivalent of the Mayan monuments are historical markers. These markers are ubiquitous, one Internet database lists over 24,000, in what is almost surely an incomplete count.

If an interval of 1200 to 1500 years were to pass, how much useful historical information could we draw from the surviving historical markers about 17th to 21st Century history? (As an aside, could the text from all the markers yield a comprehensible narrative history of American society?)

As a thought experiment, say that 0.1% of all markers are destroyed each year. Applying the rule of 70, half of all existing monuments would disappear in 700 years. After 1400 years only a quarter would remain. That would take the count mentioned above from 24,000 to approximately 6000.

In addition, besides outright destruction, the markers would be subject to damage that makes them harder to read. Suppose that the average marker has 100 significant syntactical units (subject phrases, verbs, objects, subordinate clauses, etc.) For instance, the marker on the left above, has 13 significant semantic units, beginning with, " Approaching Statesboro." If in any given year 0.1% of the syntactical units suffers some damage, how long does it take for the semantic unit to be unreadable? Again the rule of 70 suggests that in 1400 years only a quarter of the units will be fully intelligible, although probably enough would remain of the first sentence to suggest a battle occurred. Of course, the causes of the battle would be obscure, at least in terms of this marker.