Triple major uses biological techniques to show
relationships between ancient writing systems

Christina Skelton knew she was one of nine finalists for a George H. Mitchell Award for Academic Excellence from the University Co-operative Society. She just didn’t know which one.

Christina Skelton stands outside the Archives Room in the Mycenaean palace of Pylos. Many clay tablets bearing Linear B script were found here.

She sat in the Four Seasons Hotel with her parents, a friend from high school and one of her supervisors, David Hillis, professor of integrative biology. To build suspense, the announcer started with the lowest prize, for $2,000. When the penultimate prize was announced and her name still had not been called, she knew she had won the Grand Prize: $20,000.

“I was so excited,” Skelton said. “I was not jumping up and down, but I wanted to.”

Skelton was recognized for research that combines her interests in science and classics. She was the first person to successfully apply the methods biologists use to draw evolutionary trees for living species to the study of writing systems.

Writing systems and languages are not the same thing, although they are related, Skelton said.

She proved that “phylogenetic” techniques could illuminate how a writing system called Linear B evolved over time and how it related to an earlier writing system called Linear A. The Linear B script was used to write Mycenaean, an early form of Greek. It predated the Greek alphabet. In principle, Skelton’s methods could be applied to any writing systems to better understand their development and interrelationships.

Her method independently produced relative dates for several samples of Linear B which matched well with dates determined from archaeological techniques.

Her paper is in press with the journal Archaeometry.

The work is especially remarkable given that it sprung from interests she had even before high school and carried out as an undergraduate at The University of Texas at Austin.

An Interest in Just About Everything

After five years of Latin, Christina Skelton had exhausted her school’s ability to teach her ancient languages. As a senior in a private high school, she went part time to The University of Texas at Austin to study Greek, Linear B and the ancient writer Herodotus.

As a college freshman, she went to Mycenae in Greece to assist in an archaeological dig.

“Sometimes I got to be the trench supervisor,” she said. “I’d get to write everything down in the log book and sometimes even tell people where to dig next.”

She won first place in the Intermediate Greek category at the 2005 Watkins Greek and Latin Sight Translation Contest hosted by Eta Sigma Phi, the national honorary society for classical studies.

Apart from digging in the dirt, there would seem to be little connection between ancient writing and geology.

“I’ve always had an interest in just about everything,” Skelton said. “As a kid, I liked rocks and minerals and had a collection. I was interested in dinosaurs, so I read everything I could about that. It never wore off.”

So she spent two summers in high school volunteering with Ann Molineux at the Invertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at the university. She cleaned and cataloged fossils, cut foam and entered data. When an international conference on extinct bivalves known as rudists came to the university, she was there filling the coffee pots. It was a good place to be. She got to attend talks and go on field trips around central Texas.

Now she is pursuing a bachelor’s degree with a triple major in geological sciences, classics and Plan II (an interdisciplinary honors program spanning humanities, arts and sciences).

This summer, she’s off to the Goethe Institute in Dresden to learn a new language—German. And she’ll visit the U.K. to collaborate with one of the world’s leading Linear B scholars on a new article solicited by the journal Minos. In the fall, it’s back to Austin to finish her bachelor’s degree.

And then what?

“I’ll get a Ph.D. and go into academia,” she said. “I just don’t know what it’ll be in.”

Back to Work

Tom Palaima, a classics professor at The University of Texas at Austin and expert on Linear B, supervised Skelton’s research on the writing system. When she received the award, he gave her some sage advice: “Take some time to enjoy the celebrity, but remember you are the same person now that you were before. Take these things for what they are worth. No more.”

Skelton is thrilled by the honor, but it hasn’t changed her drive and her perspective. What will she do with the $20,000?

“It might sound boring,” she said, “but I’ll use it for research and school as the need arises.”

When asked how it felt to have achieved so much at such a young age, she appropriately recounted a story from the classics:

Ancient Rome was still a republic ruled by the Senate. There was a crisis—an invading army had surrounded part of the Roman army and threatened to advance and capture the capital. The Senate couldn’t agree on a course of action, so it decided to elect Cincinnatus, a former senator, to become emperor and save the republic. They found him plowing his fields and implored him to help. He went to Rome, took charge of the consular army and defeated the invaders. When he returned 16 days later, he gave up one of the most powerful jobs in the world and went straight back to his fields to finish plowing.

“It’s like, ‘I’m not going to break out the wine, I have to go plow my field,’” Skelton said. “Or in my case, ‘That’s great, now I’ve got to go do my homework.’”