Mary Kate Kelly is a PhD Candidate in Linguistic Anthropology at Tulane University. She started with the Proyecto Arqueológico Waka’ in 2017 to advance the documentation of the epigraphic record at the site. These efforts include photographic and photogrammetric documentation, and the production of illustrations and 3D models of the texts, beginning with those discovered since the start of the PAW. Her research interests begin at the decipherment and historical record of Maya hieroglyphs, and expand out to historical sociolinguistics and the world’s writing systems. Her dissertation looks at the linguistic variation present in ancient Maya inscriptions, in order to gain insight as to the distribution of different, but related, linguistic groups among the Maya.