Copador-Style Glyphs on Ceramics from Honduras and El Salvador: Sign Inventory and Structural Analysis

This thesis investigates the usage of glyphs on Copador pottery and related ceramicstyles. Glyphic elements are a well-known component of Copador pottery decoration andprevious work has described typologies of Copador bands and some artistic preferences(Beaudry-Corbett 1984; Caballero Díaz 2017; Longyear 1952; Sharer 1978b), but littleresearch has been done on the distributional patterns of individual glyphs. This thesisaddresses the question of what arrangements are possible on the level of individual signs,and whether these arrangements are likely to serve as a linguistic representation. Thestudy includes overviews of text characteristics and individual signs, along with statisticalcomparisons against Mayan texts. The results show that Copador texts differ from Mayantexts at nearly every level. No evidence is found for a Mayan or non-Mayan linguistic readingfor the glyphs, but similarities to known glyphs and vessel iconography could indicate othersymbolic meanings.