Excavations at La Sufricaya, a minor ritual group in the outskirts of the Lowland Maya city of Holmul, have documented two mural paintings inside an elite building of Early Classic date (A.D. 300–A.D. 600). One of the paintings is mythological in nature (Mural 9). The second bears an inscription with references to calendrical and historical events. It commemorates a notorious arrival date at Tikal on 11 Eb 15 Mak (January 16, A.D. 378) on its first anniversary. The architecture and artifacts associated with the murals combine Maya and Teotihuacan decorative motifs, and offer several parallels with Tikal assemblages. The iconography, epigraphy, and archaeological associations of these murals are discussed in relation to the function of the palace complex. This important new evidence contributes to an understanding of which role relations with Teotihuacan may have played in regional politics in the Maya Lowlands during the Early Classic period from the point of view of a smaller site. The interpretations presented here focus on the concept of political intervention of Tikal in the affairs of secondary and tertiary sites.

Error spectrum shaping (ESS) quantizers reduce the quantization error of oversampled signals by using quantizer error feedback to position the quantizer error power outside the frequency band of interest. Previous analyses of ESS quantizers do not consider either the limitations of realizable reconstruction filters or the effects of quantizer saturation. Consequently, predictions of ESS distortion were often'optimistic. This paper extends the original analysis to include the use of non-ideal reconstruction filters. Simulations show that this extended analysis predicts accurately the distortion of non-saturating ESS quantizers. An attempt to account analytically for saturation effects led to a difficult non-linear design problem. A constraint on the energy of the feedback filter impulse response was effective in suppressing saturation and led to a straightforward linear optimization problem.

Khipus are knotted-string devices that were used in the Inka Empire for communication and for recording information. We recently analyzed the names and associated khipu cords in a newly discovered hybrid khipul alphabetic text from the Central Andes. Results indicate a significant relationship in the text between knot direction and a form of social organization known as moieties, in which S-knots correspond to the upper (Hanan) moiety and Z-knots correspond to the lower (Urin) moiety. This relationship suggests that knot direction was used to indicate moiety in Andean khipus and, as such, may represent the first decipherment of a structural element in khipus since the decoding of the number system in the 1920s.

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