For a long time, anthropologists believed that a written language was a hallmark of a society being complex or 'advanced.' A new study on precolonial Mesoamerican societies shows that you can have a ...

Ancient writing systems tell stories of forgotten civilizations and lost knowledge. Their decipherment often requires decades of scholarly work, combining linguistics, archaeology, and historical ...

It is easy to be English-centric when we think about learning to read. Most of our knowledge about learning to read has focused on English-speaking children. Most reading researchers speak English.

The late, great sinologist Simon Leys once pointed out a peculiar paradox. China is the world’s oldest surviving civilization, and yet very little material of its past remains—far less than in Europe ...