Equally important were his contributions to understanding the hieroglyphs, culture and history of the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
[2] When World War II broke out, he enrolled as a meteorologist in the XXII Weather Squadron, US Army Air Corps.
Awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation, he worked on Oneida verb morphology in the department of anthropology at Yale.
He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1949 (his chair was Bernard Bloch[3]), and his dissertation formed the basis of a 1953 publication (Oneida Verb Morphology) that established a framework and terminology followed ever since in the analysis of Iroquoian languages.
Lounsbury was an early proponent of Yuri Knorozov's phonetic theory on the Maya hieroglyphs, namely, that they were syllables rather than ideograms.
A correlation constant is the number of days between the start of the Julian Period (January 1, 4713 BCE) and the era date of the Long Count of 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk'u.