J. Eric S. Thompson
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Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson (31 December 1898 – 9 September 1975) was an English archeologist and Mayanist epigrapher, regarded as the pre-eminent mid-20th century scholar of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. He was generally known as J. Eric S. Thompson in print and Eric Thompson to his colleagues.
Thompson was born in London and studied anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
In 1925 he began working under Dr. Sylvanus Morley of the Carnegie Institution on the archeological project at Chichen Itza. He took his new bride honeymooning through the jungle by mule to make one of the first explorations of the Maya site of Coba.
Thompson was, as he himself noted, of the last generation of "generalist" archeologists in the field, engaging in activities from finding and mapping new sites, excavation, study of Maya ceramics, art and iconography, Maya hieroglyphics, some ethnology on the side, and writing books for both technical and lay audiences.
Thompson conducted a number of excavations at sites in British Honduras (present-day Belize). He was one of the first in the field to investigate and excavate smaller sites in areas away from the elite ceremonial centers, to learn more about the lives of common Maya people.
Expanding on the earlier work of John T. Goodman and Juan H. Martinez-Hernandez, (largely neglected by other scholars at the time), Thompson developed the correlation between the Maya calendar and the Gregorian calendar that became generally accepted.
Thompson did considerable work with the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics, especially those related to the calendar and astronomy, as well as identifying some new nouns. He developed a numerical cataloguing system for the glyphs (the T-number system), which, with some expansions, is still used by Mayanists today. He initially supported Morley's contention that history was not to be found in the inscriptions, but changed his position in light of the work of Tatiana Proskouriakoff in the 1960s.
His attempted decipherments were based on ideographic rather than linguistic principles. In his later years he resisted the notion that the glyphs have a strong phonetic component, as put forward by the Russian linguist Yuri Knorosov. After his death, for a time some younger Maya epigraphers blamed Thompson for holding back what became a very fruitful approach to the glyphs with his forceful and articulate disagreements. Michael D. Coe, one of the most prominent proponents of the phonetic approach while Thompson was still alive, has said that the degree of this hostility was unwarranted. In any case, the value and correctness of the phonetic approach was not so obvious in the 1960s and early 1970s as it would become in retrospect with the later progress in Maya decipherment.
Thompson had an erudite but inviting writing style, often displaying a dry wit. He wrote an autobiography covering his early career in the field, Maya Archeologist.
Thompson was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975. He died shortly thereafter the same year in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire.
