Today at Brown

Stephen Houston’s archaeology is informed by the conviction that everything is connected. He has long maintained that nothing can be profitably studied in isolation. This applies to the tangible artifacts of civilizations, from epigraphs to buildings, as much as it does to languages and beliefs.

A decade and a half ago, writing in the introduction to proceedings of a symposium on Mayan architecture, he made an eloquent case for a conjunctive approach to scholarship, embracing context and complexity: “Documentation of architecture often becomes a conclusion rather than a beginning. This it should never be. I believe we must ... go beyond simple description to an assault on vexatious problems of meaning, function, and development. Our spirit must be interdisciplinary and impervious to intellectual parochialism. To paraphrase Mao, may a thousand flowers bloom, a thousand approaches, a thousand varieties of archaeology be brought to bear, without excluding one another.”

A scholar of the dynastic civilization of the ancient Maya in Central America and Mexico, Houston has taken on a wide range of research questions in just such a spirit of openness and rigor. His field-based investigations have focused on interpretation of hieroglyphs, origins of writing, lexicography, linguistics, Maya buildings and cityscapes, concepts of the body, religion, anthropology of art, and meanings of color. He sees the material he examines as inextricable from its cultural, political, and historical context, and as the object of demanding scholarship that recognizes no boundaries of discipline or methodology.

In awarding him one of its celebrated fellowships for 2008, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation was specific in recognizing Houston’s “interdisciplinary approach [which] brings into sharper focus the poetics and preoccupations of ancient Maya texts and illuminates the relationship between histories recorded in hieroglyphic texts and those pieced together through archaeological evidence.” Implicit in the award is the Foundation’s appreciation for the new grantee’s “creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future.”

AMONG THE CONTRIBUTIONS  that have won Houston international recognition are his cultural and epigraphic investigations of ancient Maya sites in Belize and Guatemala, including his long-term leadership of excavations at Piedras Negras in the Petén Department of Guatemala. The goal of the work at Piedras Negras was to reconstruct the 400-year-long biography of the city: the political purposes behind its creation, changes over time in the use of its buildings and districts, and the internal and external factors that contributed to its fall around 800 A.D. “The things the residents of Piedras Negras left behind continue to tell their story,” Houston notes. His mission is to decode these things so that the voices of ancient Mesoamerica can “speak to us today.” To date his efforts have yielded a rich trove of publications, including such influential books as The Memory of Bones: Body, Being and Experience among the Classic Maya and The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing.

Houston was in the midst of the Piedras Negras project when he joined the Brown faculty, and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, in 2004. He left a chair at Brigham Young University for a full professorship in the anthropology department. His presence has contributed significantly to the University’s research and teaching strengths in New World archaeology. In 2007, Houston was appointed to an endowed chair in social sciences, established by the Dupee family as part of the Campaign for Academic Enrichment. Income from the Dupee endowment helps support Houston’s research and his students’ involvement in field studies.

The National Endowment for the Humanities, a past funder, last spring awarded Houston a new grant for excavation and study of the ancient Maya kingdom of El Zotz, in northern Guatemala. The project is particularly exciting because El Zotz, although located close to the heavily investigated and developed site of Tikal, has barely been explored.

HOUSTON’S WORK AT EL ZOTZ promises to contribute to understanding of the political dynamics of the area during the sixth century A.D. El Zotz was established in a location inhospitable to farming and hunting but favorable for trade, in fact at the crossroads of two important trade routes. It grew up just as neighboring Tikal was failing. “We know from inscriptions that El Zotz had close bonds to Tikal’s enemies,” Houston says. “The settlement may have had a purely political motivation.”

Architectural innovations took place at El Zotz, including early attempts to use certain pyramid forms. Images and decipherable writing survive on some architectural components. Writing on pots reveals the emergence of new religious preoccupations, including “dreams as essences of the soul,” according to Houston. “There’s a lot of tantalizing material that poses fascinating questions about the role of El Zotz in the development of classic Maya civilization,” he says. Working with Brown graduate students and a team of Guatemalan archaeologists, Houston has mapped the site and begun work on what will be three seasons of projected excavations.

Houston traces a detail from a Mayan frieze. El Zotz is also at the heart of a major multi-team research undertaking in which Houston is collaborating with Brown graduate students and colleagues, as well as scholars from outside the University. The Landscape Succession Project has the ambitious goal of investigating how settlements at three Maya sites – El Zotz, Bejucal, and El Palmar, all in a lowland area central to trade and politics – responded to local and regional alterations in the natural landscape and in the political environment over the course of 2,000 years, covering three periods of Maya civilization. Two hypotheses will be tested: one, that early settlements were built to take advantage of rich natural resources; and two, that later settlements were established primarily to achieve geopolitical goals.

Comprehensive and intensely multidisciplinary, the Landscape Succession Project will engage three research teams in collecting and analyzing epigraphic, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental data using a range of methods and techniques, including remote sensing. Houston is director of site excavations and epigraphy for the project. His collaborators include Brown postdoctoral researcher Tom Garrison, director of regional survey and remote sensing; Georgetown University Professor of Geography and Geoscience Timothy Beach, director of paleoenvironmental studies; and Brown anthropology graduate students Nick Carter, James Doyle, Cassandra Mesick, and Caitlin Walker.

Upon learning of his MacArthur grant, Houston recognized the challenge of how best to use the wholly unrestricted funds it would supply over the next five years. His first concern was to apply them in ways that would advance his research and make it more productive.  “I’m not the kind of person,” he said, “who’s going to rush out and buy a BMW.”