Previous Kislak Chair

Stephen Houston

The Library of Congress appointed Stephen Houston, an anthropologist, archaeologist and epigrapher, as the inaugural Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas at the John W. Kluge Center.

He began his tenure on September 2018 and worked on a project titled “Classic Choreography: The Meaning of Ancient Maya Movement.”

Stephen Houston is the Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University. He has worked on the excavations of several major Mayan cities, most recently the ancient city of El Zotz in Guatemala and on collaborative advances in mapping with lidar technology. His interpretations of stylized representations of the human body reveal the concepts that underlie ancient Maya existence and his research on writing around the world reconstructs how early scripts begin, flourish and die. A major participant in the decipherment of Maya script, Houston draws on inscriptions and figural art to reconstruct the political and social structure of Mayan civilization, including the dynamics of royal court life and the role of religion.

Learn More About Stephen Houston

Stephen Houston delivers the Kislak Lecture titled "Flint, Shield, and Fire: Exploring Ancient Maya Warfare". Drawing on recent explorations, Houston showcased the Lidar technology now revolutionizing the study of Pre-Columbian civilizations.

The following materials link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Links to digital content are provided when available.

The Gifted Passage by Stephen Houston
Call Number: F1435.3.A7 H678 2018
ISBN: 9780300228960
Published/Created: 2018-03-13
In this book Stephen Houston turns his attention to the crucial role of young males in Classic Maya society, drawing on evidence from art, writing, and material culture. The Gifted Passage establishes that adolescent men in Maya art were the subjects and makers of hieroglyphics, painted ceramics, and murals, in works that helped to shape and reflect masculinity in Maya civilization. The political volatility of the Classic Maya period gave male adolescents valuable status as potential heirs, and many of the most precious surviving ceramics likely celebrated their coming-of-age rituals. The ardent hope was that youths would grow into effective kings and noblemen, capable of leadership in battle and service in royal courts. Aiming to shift mainstream conceptions of the Maya, Houston argues that adolescent men were not simply present in images and texts, but central to both.
An Inconstant Landscape by Thomas G. Garrison (Editor); Stephen Houston (Editor)
Call Number: F1435.1.Z68 I53 2018
ISBN: 9781607327639
Published/Created: 2019-01-15
Presenting the results of six years of archaeological survey and excavation in and around the Maya kingdom of El Zotz, An Inconstant Landscape paints a complex picture of a dynamic landscape over the course of almost 2,000 years of occupation. El Zotz was a dynastic seat of the Classic period in Guatemala. Located between the renowned sites of Tikal and El Perú-Waka', it existed as a small kingdom with powerful neighbors and serves today as a test-case of political debility and strength during the height of dynastic struggles among the Classic Maya.
The Life Within by Stephen Houston
Call Number: F1435.3.M32 H68 2014
ISBN: 9780300196023
Published/Created: 2014-03-25
For the Classic Maya, who flourished in and around the Yucatan peninsula in the first millennium AD, artistic materials were endowed with an internal life. Far from being inert substances, jade, flint, obsidian, and wood held a vital essence, agency, and even personality. To work with these materials was to coax their life into full expression and to engage in witty play. Writing, too, could shift from hieroglyphic signs into vibrant glyphs that sprouted torsos, hands, and feet. Appearing to sing, grapple, and feed, they effectively blurred the distinction between text and image. In this first full study of the nature of Maya materials and animism, Stephen Houston provides startling insights into a Pre-Columbian worldview that dramatically contrasts with western perspectives.
Re-Presenting the Past by Sheila Bonde (Editor); Stephen Houston (Editor)
Call Number: CC77.H5 R425 2013
ISBN: 9781782972310
Published/Created: 2013-07-01
The archaeological past exists for us through intermediaries. Some are written works, descriptions, narratives and field notes, while others are visual: the drawings, paintings, photographs, powerpoints or computer visualizations that allow us to re-present past forms of human existence. This volume brings together nine papers, six of which were presented at a symposium hosted at Brown University. Two papers explore the classical past and medieval visualizations. Three treat the Maya, and one considers the imaging by eighteenth-century antiquarians of British history; yet another ranges broadly in its historical considerations. Several consider the trajectory over time of visualization and self-imaging. Others engage with issues of recording by looking, for example, at the ways in which nineteenth-century excavation photographs can aid in the reconstruction of an inscription or by evaluating the process of mapping a site with ArcGIS and computer animation software.
The Shape of Script by Stephen D. Houston
Call Number: Z105 .S257 2012
ISBN: 9781934691427
Published/Created: 2012-04-04
This book builds on earlier projects about the origins and extinctions of script traditions throughout the world in an effort to address the fundamental questions of how and why writing systems change. The contributors--who study ancient scripts from Arabic to Roman, from Bronze Age China to Middle Kingdom Egypt--utilize an approach that views writing less as a technology than as a mode of communication, one that is socially learned and culturally transmitted.
The Classic Maya by Stephen D. Houston; Takeshi Inomata
Call Number: F1435 .H795 2009
ISBN: 9780521669726
Published/Created: 2009-09-14
In the first millennium AD, the Classic Maya created courtly societies in and around the Yucatan Peninsula that have left some of the most striking intellectual and aesthetic achievements of the ancient world, including large settlements like Tikal, Copan, and Palenque. This book is the first in-depth synthesis of the Classic Maya. It is richly informed by new decipherments of hieroglyphs and decades of intensive excavation and survey. Structured by categories of person in society, it reports on kings, queens, nobles, gods, and ancestors, as well as the many millions of farmers and other figures who lived in societies predicated on sacred kingship and varying political programs. The Classic Maya presents a tandem model of societies bound by moral covenants and convulsed by unavoidable tensions between groups, all affected by demographic trends and changing environments. Focusing on the Classic heartland but referring to other zones, it will serve as the basic source for all readers interested in the civilization of the Maya.

The following posts appeared in the Library of Congress blog—Insights: the Scholarly Work of the John W. Kluge Center. This blog shares the knowledge gleaned from the research of top scholars in the humanities and social sciences in residence at the Library of Congress. Links to digital content are provided when available.

The Oldest Idea in the World?
The association of directions with colors may be the oldest known set of philosophical ideas in the world, transmitted from ancient Asia to the Americas over 10,000 years ago. (January 17, 2019)
What Did Ancient Americans Find Funny?
Dr. Stephen Houston is interviewed about the academic workshops he convened at the The John W. Kluge Center. This blog post is focused on the workshop about humor in the Early Americas. (April 17, 2019)
Conflict, Fortresses, and Threat Environments in the Ancient Maya World
On April 25, 2019, Dr. Stephen Houston offered the Kislak Lecture titled “Flint, Shield, and Fire: Exploring Ancient Maya Warfare.” In this interview, he discusses the themes related to the event. (April 22, 2019)

The following item appeared in News from the Library of Congress, a service of the Library's Office of Communications.

Library of Congress Appoints Inaugural Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas
The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress announced the appointment of Stephen Houston, an anthropologist, archaeologist and epigrapher, as the inaugural Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas. He began his tenure on September 2018. (April 23, 2018)

The following links feature presentations by Stephen Houston available on the external site YouTube.

Beyond Script: Notation and Memory at the Margins of Writing (Video) External
Shallit Lecture given by Dr. Stephen Houston at Brigham Young University Anthropology Department on February 24, 2009. Writing is often understood to include the graphic systems that encode and reflect speech. Those systems are familiar to scholars, who, for some centuries, have addressed the origins, development, setting, and extinction of writing in a wide variety of times and places. What lie outside conventional study are the graphic notations that do not clearly express speech - the notches, threads, scratches, potter's and mason's marks, the tally sticks of the Middle Ages and the Caribbean banana boat, all of which invade, trigger, and mold memory through well-developed systems of meaning and practice. Because of their ubiquity and broad application, these, too, deserve fresh review, and a reintroduction into the study of human expression.
Run, Don't Walk: Sacred Movement among the Classic Maya (Video) External
The Classic Maya made a critical distinction between the ordinary daily movement of humans and sacred, formal movement. Dr. Stephen D. Houston examines a rich inventory of glyphic references, imagery, and formal routes to show how linear movement formed the essence of sacred and marked motion among the Maya. The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University presented the Tatiana Proskouriakoff Award Lecture 2013 on October 3, 2013.
El Zotz masks yield insights into Maya beliefs (Video) External
A team of archaeologists led by Dr. Stephen Houston has made a new discovery at the Maya archaeological site in El Zotz, Guatemala, uncovering a pyramid believed to celebrate the Maya sun god. The structure's outer walls depict the god in an unprecedented set of images done in painted stucco. In 2010, the team uncovered a royal tomb filled with artifacts and human remains at the same site. Researchers believe the pyramid was built to link the deceased lord to the eternal sun.

Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas

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Previous Kislak Chair

Stephen Houston

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