....which looks a lot like God A, one of the Maya Death Gods (which, by the way, is an excellent name for a band). This would not make Chipotle the first major American chain restaurant to decorate with death iconography from another culture (that distinction may go to P.F. Chang's, with their terracotta soldiers), but I'm of the opinion "death by burrito" should be about portion size, and not about inadvertently invoking the wrath of an ancient deity.

In order to get more information, I wrote an email to Dr. Marc Zender one of the leading scholars on Maya glyphs and author of The Book on the subject, asking if he could tell me whether the bas relief decoration at this Chipotle was imitating some known work or complete gibberish (email title: "a frivolous question"). To my surprise, he responded, and the answer is that it's a little of both. He told me that the artist for Chipotle intended to copy a well-known collection of stucco glyphs from Palenque's Temple 18.

He explained: "The text was commissioned by the early 8th-century king K'inich Ahkal Mo' Nahb, and had fallen from the rear wall of a temple in antiquity. The stuccos were then recovered piecemeal by several different archaeological projects between the 1920s and 1950s. Primarily because their original order couldn't be determined, but also because most of them couldn't be read at that time, the curators at Palenque's archaeological site museum unfortunately ended up mounting them in (unreversible) cement, placing similar signs next to one another and creating a nonsensical text. "

He went on to explain that " the Chipotle artist has also picked glyphs at random from this collection and has made his best attempt to copy them. It's not a bad effort in some places, but note the 'bird with wings' the artist has created in the bottom rightmost glyph, as well as some missing or invented details in a few other places." So my intuitions that (1) it was partially invented and (2) the artist followed the Portlandia mantra "put a bird on it" both check out! I was paying attention.

Then, Dr. Zender made my day. "Just for the fun of it," He translated the glyph blocks from Chipotle: (left to right, top to bottom):

u - K'AM - ma - K'AJAN ?- ch'o - ko

- - - ?- - uk'amk'ajan ch'ok

"the youth's rope-taking" (a ceremony)



u - TZ'AK - AJ

- - utz'akaj

"its count" (calendric information)



WAX - YAX - SIHOOM - ma

- - - "6 Yax" (part of a date)



chu - lu - ku -?

- - -? Chuluk ... (pre-accession name of the king)



i - K'A' - yi

- - i k'a'ayi

"his ... stopped" (a death verb, here referring to the king's father)



TIWOL ?-4- ma - ta

?-4- - Tiwohl Chan Mat (the father of the king)



mu - ka - ja

- - muhkaj "he was buried" (again referring to the father)



u ?- na - ta - la

?- - - u naahtal "the first"? (ordinal title?)



MO' - na - bi

- - ... Mo' Nahb (part of the name of the king)

Dr. Zender also explained that the "shrunken head" glyph I thought might be God A is actually a complex Early Classic spelling of the name of the serpent deity Chak Bay Kaan (CHAK-ba-ya-ka-KAAN). He went on "We're still not sure what bay means, but the other portions of the name are 'Red ... Serpent'."

So there you have it folks. Death verbs. "He was buried." Enigmatic dates. Mysterious serpents. Next time you're at Chipotle, forget the secret menu and instead focus on what one of my colleagues at U Penn enthusiastically referred to as a "disjoined, incoherent stream of historical tidbits." (Said colleague continued, "in that sense, it's not that different from the history of the non-European world that most people get anyway.")

Now if I could only figure out why a restaurant with a Nahuatl (=Aztec) name has Maya glyphs everywhere...