I know you say you’re describing from memory but wanted to comment in case other people read this comment and get the wrong idea: the decipherment of Maya writing was nothing like described here.
If you’re interested, a great popular account is given in Micheal Coe’s book Breaking the Maya Code or you can read an interview with David Stuart, who started work on Maya writing when he was ten! https://nightfirefilms.org/breakingthemayacode/interviews/St...
The controversy of the dominant early deciphering school ignoring the phonetic approach of the linguist Knorozov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov seems a very real and important episode in the decipherement saga. The context here is not the history of Mayan glyph deciphering but the role of utilizing local knowledge
If you’re interested, a great popular account is given in Micheal Coe’s book Breaking the Maya Code or you can read an interview with David Stuart, who started work on Maya writing when he was ten! https://nightfirefilms.org/breakingthemayacode/interviews/St...