I love all these Maya inscriptions. I hope more are discovered (and hopefully some manuscripts) - the little we do have of Maya text is amazing. What are your top 3 things to tell people at parties that no little about Maya?
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Unlike Egyptian pyramids, the Maya built their temples layer by layer outward, so to understand them, researchers tunneled into the structures to understand the earlier phases of construction. I arranged the guided versions of the virtual tours in a rough chronology, moving from the highest to the lowest and oldest areas: the hieroglyphic stairway composing the largest Maya inscription anywhere, the Rosalila temple that was buried fully intact, and finally the tomb of the Founder of the city, Yax Kʼukʼ Moʼ.
I've been working to build on top of the Matterport SDK with Three.js--and then reusing the data in Unreal for a desktop experience or rendering for film (coming soon to PBS).
Blog about process: https://blog.mused.com/what-lies-beneath-digitally-recording...
Major thanks to the Matterport team for providing support with data alignment and merging tunnels while I was living in the village near site.
For me, the Maya have always been important because they're our history and our stories in the Americas (I'm from the US) -- more than the greco-roman mythology I grew up with. They grew corn and love ball games. Their stories are more directly our stories, and their struggles are our struggles.
Not to be political, but they also kind of wiped themselves out by large scale environmental collapse, and the jungle is filled with their undiscovered monuments. There's still so much to learn.
People really geek out on how much the Maya knew about astronomy too -- they shot archaeoastronomy docs twice while I was working on site. Richard Feynman even helped decipher Maya glyphs and writes about it in "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman". He gave a lecture also if the audio file can be checked out somehow: https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/repositories/2/acce...