Stephen Houston
Biographic Data
| ID | 3618285 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Houston |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Houston |
| SIGNATURE | HOUSTON S |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 569 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Un trono dividido: El origen y los movimientos de la Banca Jeroglífica 1 de Ixtutz, Guatemala
Aquí presentamos el descubrimiento de una banca jeroglífica esculpida del sitio maya de Ixtutz, Petén, Guatemala. Analizamos la inscripción jeroglífica en la banca y discutimos la historia del objecto en el contexto de su producción, su desmantelamiento y reutilización subsecuente, y la remoción de unas piezas del sitio. Mostramos que dos bloques inscritos de caliza, uno de ellos en una colección privada en Bruselas y el otro en el Los Angeles Co…
Sourcing novelty: On the “secondary invention” of writing
Chronology and the evidence for war in the ancient Maya kingdom of Piedras Negras
The Hidden Language of Graphic Signs: Cryptic Writing and Meaningful Marks
A common belief is that systems of writing are committed to transparency and precise records of sound. The target is the language behind such marks. Readers, not viewers, matter most, and the most effective graphs largely record sound, not meaning. But what if embellishments mattered deeply - if hidden writing, slow to produce, slow to read, played as enduring a role as more accessible graphs? What if meaningful marks did service alongside record…
Literacy among the Pre-Columbian Maya: A Comparative Perspective
Centering the Classic Maya Kingdom of Sak Tz’i’
In this article, we provide the results of preliminary archaeological and epigraphic research undertaken at the site of Lacanjá Tzeltal, Chiapas. Field research conducted in 2018, in collaboration with local community members, has allowed us to identify this archaeological site as the capital of a kingdom known from Classic period Maya inscriptions as "Sak Tz'i'" (White Dog). Because all previously known references to the kingdom came from looted…
What Is a Hieroglyph
We consider two unrelated traditions of hieroglyphic writing, Maya and Egyptian, to discuss distinctive features of such mixed, logo-phonetic writing systems. Hieroglyphic scripts are characterized by their sustained pictoriality and by sign forms that are not reducible to stroke, line patterns or fonts. Moreover, the systems are tightly integrated with a broader aesthetic culture, and represent an encyclopedically dense mode of visual communicat…
An Inconstant Landscape
The Gifted Passage: Young Men in Classic Maya Art and Text
In this thought-provoking book, preeminent scholar 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 o…
An Inconstant Landscape
Ingenuity and Ambivalence in Maya Writing
Scribal reception and status among the Classic Maya drew on subtle skills and playful games. But it also rested on an evident understanding that scribes (or sculptors) and their provincial patrons needed to obey their superiors. Certain clues indicate that the producers of script existed within established obligations of tribute, for written memorials as well. Elsewhere, myths provide enduring templates for humanity, and that was no less true for…
Molded meaning
True People, Foreigners, and the Framing of Maya Morality
Writing that Isn't: Pseudo-Scripts in Comparative View
BY COMMON UNDERSTANDING, writing is a graphic means of recording sound and meaning. It is not language per se, but a selective expression of that basic human attribute, as leavened and mediated by writing itself. Other messages come through as well. Think of emoticons, which encapsulate facial features and emotional states, or, in Christian contexts, a cross that is affixed to the names of the dead. To most scholars, systems of writing do not jus…
Through seeing stones: Maya epigraphy as a mature discipline
Special Section: New Dialogues About Ancient Maya
Most people think of Maya civilisation, if they do at all, while on vacation. A daytrip from a beach takes them to ruins nearby, crowded with tourists in correct holiday gear. In the recent past, others might have grown anxious about the portentous significance of the year 2012. Maya glyphs, so the hucksters affirmed, predicted a cascade of dire events, not one of which (predictably) has come to pass. Then there are those living in Mayaland itsel…
A Neighborly View: Water and Environmental History of the El Zotz Region
The Cambridge World History
From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas. Through case studies and comparative accounts of key cities across the world, leading scholars chart the ways in which these cities grew as nodal…
Masterful hands: Morelli and the Maya on the Hieroglyphic Stairway, Copan, Honduras
Areal Shifts in Classic Mayan Phonology
Advances in hieroglyphic decipherment and in language contact typology provide new data and theories with which to investigate and reassess prior interpretations of Mayan linguistic history. The present study considers the shift from proto-Mayan*kand *k'to /ch/ and /ch'/, a sound change that affected several Mayan languages in different phonological contexts. This sound change, with a very particular set of conditions, has been highlighted as a d…
Reading in Context: The Interpretation of Personal Reference in Ancient Maya Hieroglyphic Texts
The interpretation of deixis in language is heavily context-dependent. In spoken language, the addressee(s) have the context of an utterance to aid in its interpretation. In writing, however, language can become separated from both its creator and the context of its creation. This article investigates the use of certain deictics-first and second person markers-in ancient Maya hieroglyphics (circa AD 250-900). The temporal and cultural gap that se…
The Good Prince: Transition, Texting and Moral Narrative in the Murals of Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico
Nearly seventy years ago, a group of competitive explorers, few on good terms, reconnoitred the Maya ruins of Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico. There, in what is now known as Structure 1, they found the most densely figured and compositionally ambitious paintings from Precolumbian America – the Bonampak murals, in a building dated by their final, painted notation to c. AD 791. The themes, events, dramatis personae, dynastic setting and execution of the …
Discovering ancient Maya settlements using airborne radar elevation data
The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact by Gary Tomlinson
A Splendid Predicament: Young Men in Classic Maya Society
The Classic Maya, like many peoples in the ancient world, paid keen attention to male youths as a key age/gender grade, and, in the Maya example, to those who would inherit a courtly world of privilege and domination. Detection of glyphic texts and images relevant to male youth reveals them to be a major interest of elite Classic society, participating in tribute, dances and battle. This transient status, marked by infancy and juvenility on one e…
Of gods, glyphs and kings: Divinity and rulership among the Classic Maya
The ANTIQUITY prize-winning article in the last volume addressed writing, its varying nature and role in early states. Now that the decipherment of Maya writing is well advanced, we can know more of the records of kingship. From them we may discern the concepts and beliefs that defined the authority of these holy lords, as we seek the source of the power of rulers like 'Sun-faced Snake Jaguar
An Archaeology of the Senses: Perception and Cultural Expression in Ancient Mesoamerica
The ancient Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples showed an intense interest in invoking the senses, especially hearing, sight, and smell. The senses were flagged by graphic devices of synaesthetic or cross-sensory intent; writing and speech scrolls triggered sound, sightlines the acts and consequences of seeing, and flowery ornament indicated both scent and soul essence. As conceived anciently, the senses were projective and procreative, involving…
The Ancient Maya Self: Personhood and Portraiture in the Classic Period
The Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions
Recent decipherments of Classic Maya hieroglyphs (ca. a.d. 250 to 850) reveal phonological and morphological patterns that, through epigraphic and historical analyses, isolate a single, coherent prestige language with unique and widespread features in script. We term this language "Classic Ch'olti'an" and present the evidence for its explicable historical configuration and ancestral affiliation with Eastern Ch'olan languages (Ch'olti' and its sti…
The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya
All of human experience flows from bodies that feel, express emotion, and think about what such experiences mean. But is it possible for us, embodied as we are in a particular time and place, to know how people of long ago thought about the body and its experiences? In this groundbreaking book, three leading experts on the Classic Maya (ca. AD 250 to 850) marshal a vast array of evidence from Maya iconography and hieroglyphic writing, as well as …
Methodological Issues in the Provenance Investigation of Early Formative Mesoamerican Ceramics
A recent study of Early Formative Mesoamerican pottery by instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) yielded surprising results that prompted two critiques in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The INAA study indicated that the Olmec center of San Lorenzo was a major exporter of carved-incised and white pottery and that little if any pottery made elsewhere was consumed at San Lorenzo. The critiques purport to "overturn" the…
Smokescreens in the Provenance Investigation of Early Formative Mesoamerican Ceramics
We are glad that Sharer et al. (this issue) have dropped their original claim that the INAA data demonstrate multidirectional movement of Early Formative pottery. Beyond this, however, they offer nothing that might enhance understanding of Early Formative ceramic circulation or inspire new insights into Early Formative cultural evolution in Mesoamerica. Instead, their response contains fresh distortions, replications of mistakes made in their PNA…
Split Ergativity in the History of the Ch'olan Branch of the Mayan Language Family
An unchallenged assumption regarding the linguistic history of the Ch’olan branch of the Mayan language family is that this common language was “split ergative”—demonstrating an ergative/absolutive pattern of pronominal inflection in the completive aspect and a nominative/accusative pattern in the incompletive. Such a hypothesis is untenable in light of the data, which show that the Ch’olti’an branch of Ch’olan did not share in the split ergative…
A Splendid Predicament: Young Men in Classic Maya Society
The Classic Maya, like many peoples in the ancient world, paid keen attention to male youths as a key age/gender grade, and, in the Maya example, to those who would inherit a courtly world of privilege and domination. Detection of glyphic texts and images relevant to male youth reveals them to be a major interest of elite Classic society, participating in tribute, dances and battle. This transient status, marked by infancy and juvenility on one e…
The Good Prince: Transition, Texting and Moral Narrative in the Murals of Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico
Nearly seventy years ago, a group of competitive explorers, few on good terms, reconnoitred the Maya ruins of Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico. There, in what is now known as Structure 1, they found the most densely figured and compositionally ambitious paintings from Precolumbian America – the Bonampak murals, in a building dated by their final, painted notation to c. AD 791. The themes, events, dramatis personae, dynastic setting and execution of the …
Discovering ancient Maya settlements using airborne radar elevation data
Quirigua: A Classic Maya Center and Its Sculptures
Quirigua: A Classic Maya Center and Its Sculptures. Robert J. Sharer. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1990.124 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–89089–260–1
Centering the Classic Maya Kingdom of Sak Tz’i’
In this article, we provide the results of preliminary archaeological and epigraphic research undertaken at the site of Lacanjá Tzeltal, Chiapas. Field research conducted in 2018, in collaboration with local community members, has allowed us to identify this archaeological site as the capital of a kingdom known from Classic period Maya inscriptions as "Sak Tz'i'" (White Dog). Because all previously known references to the kingdom came from looted…
Reading in Context: The Interpretation of Personal Reference in Ancient Maya Hieroglyphic Texts
The interpretation of deixis in language is heavily context-dependent. In spoken language, the addressee(s) have the context of an utterance to aid in its interpretation. In writing, however, language can become separated from both its creator and the context of its creation. This article investigates the use of certain deictics-first and second person markers-in ancient Maya hieroglyphics (circa AD 250-900). The temporal and cultural gap that se…
Through seeing stones: Maya epigraphy as a mature discipline
Last Writing: Script Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica
By any measure, the creation and development of writing was a cybernetic advance with far-reaching consequences. It allowed writers to communicate with readers who were distant in time and space, extended the storage capacity of human knowledge, including information that ranged from mundane accounting to sacred narrative, bridged visual and auditory worlds by linking icons with meaningful sound, and offered an enduring means of displaying and ma…
Areal Shifts in Classic Mayan Phonology
Advances in hieroglyphic decipherment and in language contact typology provide new data and theories with which to investigate and reassess prior interpretations of Mayan linguistic history. The present study considers the shift from proto-Mayan*kand *k'to /ch/ and /ch'/, a sound change that affected several Mayan languages in different phonological contexts. This sound change, with a very particular set of conditions, has been highlighted as a d…
What Is a Hieroglyph
We consider two unrelated traditions of hieroglyphic writing, Maya and Egyptian, to discuss distinctive features of such mixed, logo-phonetic writing systems. Hieroglyphic scripts are characterized by their sustained pictoriality and by sign forms that are not reducible to stroke, line patterns or fonts. Moreover, the systems are tightly integrated with a broader aesthetic culture, and represent an encyclopedically dense mode of visual communicat…
Writing that Isn't: Pseudo-Scripts in Comparative View
BY COMMON UNDERSTANDING, writing is a graphic means of recording sound and meaning. It is not language per se, but a selective expression of that basic human attribute, as leavened and mediated by writing itself. Other messages come through as well. Think of emoticons, which encapsulate facial features and emotional states, or, in Christian contexts, a cross that is affixed to the names of the dead. To most scholars, systems of writing do not jus…
More on the Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions
Un trono dividido: El origen y los movimientos de la Banca Jeroglífica 1 de Ixtutz, Guatemala
Aquí presentamos el descubrimiento de una banca jeroglífica esculpida del sitio maya de Ixtutz, Petén, Guatemala. Analizamos la inscripción jeroglífica en la banca y discutimos la historia del objecto en el contexto de su producción, su desmantelamiento y reutilización subsecuente, y la remoción de unas piezas del sitio. Mostramos que dos bloques inscritos de caliza, uno de ellos en una colección privada en Bruselas y el otro en el Los Angeles Co…
Chronology and the evidence for war in the ancient Maya kingdom of Piedras Negras
Quirigua: A Classic Maya Center and Its Sculptures
Quirigua: A Classic Maya Center and Its Sculptures. Robert J. Sharer. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1990.124 pp. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–89089–260–1
Quirigua: A Classic Maya Center and Its Sculptures:Quirigua: A Classic Maya Center and Its Sculptures
Archeology: Understanding Maya Inscriptions: A Hieroglyph Handbook . John F. Harris and Stephen K. Stearns
Literacy among the Pre-Columbian Maya: A Comparative Perspective
The Writing System of La Mojarra and Associated Monuments . Lloyd B. Anderson
Of gods, glyphs and kings: Divinity and rulership among the Classic Maya
The ANTIQUITY prize-winning article in the last volume addressed writing, its varying nature and role in early states. Now that the decipherment of Maya writing is well advanced, we can know more of the records of kingship. From them we may discern the concepts and beliefs that defined the authority of these holy lords, as we seek the source of the power of rulers like 'Sun-faced Snake Jaguar
The Ancient Maya Self: Personhood and Portraiture in the Classic Period
An Archaeology of the Senses: Perception and Cultural Expression in Ancient Mesoamerica
The ancient Maya and other Mesoamerican peoples showed an intense interest in invoking the senses, especially hearing, sight, and smell. The senses were flagged by graphic devices of synaesthetic or cross-sensory intent; writing and speech scrolls triggered sound, sightlines the acts and consequences of seeing, and flowery ornament indicated both scent and soul essence. As conceived anciently, the senses were projective and procreative, involving…
The Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions
Recent decipherments of Classic Maya hieroglyphs (ca. a.d. 250 to 850) reveal phonological and morphological patterns that, through epigraphic and historical analyses, isolate a single, coherent prestige language with unique and widespread features in script. We term this language "Classic Ch'olti'an" and present the evidence for its explicable historical configuration and ancestral affiliation with Eastern Ch'olan languages (Ch'olti' and its sti…
Mesoamerican Architecture as a Cultural Symbol
Book Review| July 01 2001 Mesoamerican Architecture as a Cultural Symbol By Jeff Karl Kowalski. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xiv + 416 pp., preface, introduction, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth.) Stephen Houston Stephen Houston Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnohistory (2001) 48 (3): 527–530. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-48-3-527 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Cita…
More on the Language of Classic Maya Inscriptions
Last Writing: Script Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica
By any measure, the creation and development of writing was a cybernetic advance with far-reaching consequences. It allowed writers to communicate with readers who were distant in time and space, extended the storage capacity of human knowledge, including information that ranged from mundane accounting to sacred narrative, bridged visual and auditory worlds by linking icons with meaningful sound, and offered an enduring means of displaying and ma…
Une Histoire de La Religion Des Mayas: Du Panthéisme Au Panthéon
The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya
All of human experience flows from bodies that feel, express emotion, and think about what such experiences mean. But is it possible for us, embodied as we are in a particular time and place, to know how people of long ago thought about the body and its experiences? In this groundbreaking book, three leading experts on the Classic Maya (ca. AD 250 to 850) marshal a vast array of evidence from Maya iconography and hieroglyphic writing, as well as …
Methodological Issues in the Provenance Investigation of Early Formative Mesoamerican Ceramics
A recent study of Early Formative Mesoamerican pottery by instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) yielded surprising results that prompted two critiques in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The INAA study indicated that the Olmec center of San Lorenzo was a major exporter of carved-incised and white pottery and that little if any pottery made elsewhere was consumed at San Lorenzo. The critiques purport to "overturn" the…
Smokescreens in the Provenance Investigation of Early Formative Mesoamerican Ceramics
We are glad that Sharer et al. (this issue) have dropped their original claim that the INAA data demonstrate multidirectional movement of Early Formative pottery. Beyond this, however, they offer nothing that might enhance understanding of Early Formative ceramic circulation or inspire new insights into Early Formative cultural evolution in Mesoamerica. Instead, their response contains fresh distortions, replications of mistakes made in their PNA…
Split Ergativity in the History of the Ch'olan Branch of the Mayan Language Family
An unchallenged assumption regarding the linguistic history of the Ch’olan branch of the Mayan language family is that this common language was “split ergative”—demonstrating an ergative/absolutive pattern of pronominal inflection in the completive aspect and a nominative/accusative pattern in the incompletive. Such a hypothesis is untenable in light of the data, which show that the Ch’olti’an branch of Ch’olan did not share in the split ergative…
The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact by Gary Tomlinson
A Splendid Predicament: Young Men in Classic Maya Society
The Classic Maya, like many peoples in the ancient world, paid keen attention to male youths as a key age/gender grade, and, in the Maya example, to those who would inherit a courtly world of privilege and domination. Detection of glyphic texts and images relevant to male youth reveals them to be a major interest of elite Classic society, participating in tribute, dances and battle. This transient status, marked by infancy and juvenility on one e…
Discovering ancient Maya settlements using airborne radar elevation data
The Good Prince: Transition, Texting and Moral Narrative in the Murals of Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico
Nearly seventy years ago, a group of competitive explorers, few on good terms, reconnoitred the Maya ruins of Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico. There, in what is now known as Structure 1, they found the most densely figured and compositionally ambitious paintings from Precolumbian America – the Bonampak murals, in a building dated by their final, painted notation to c. AD 791. The themes, events, dramatis personae, dynastic setting and execution of the …
Reading in Context: The Interpretation of Personal Reference in Ancient Maya Hieroglyphic Texts
The interpretation of deixis in language is heavily context-dependent. In spoken language, the addressee(s) have the context of an utterance to aid in its interpretation. In writing, however, language can become separated from both its creator and the context of its creation. This article investigates the use of certain deictics-first and second person markers-in ancient Maya hieroglyphics (circa AD 250-900). The temporal and cultural gap that se…
Areal Shifts in Classic Mayan Phonology
Advances in hieroglyphic decipherment and in language contact typology provide new data and theories with which to investigate and reassess prior interpretations of Mayan linguistic history. The present study considers the shift from proto-Mayan*kand *k'to /ch/ and /ch'/, a sound change that affected several Mayan languages in different phonological contexts. This sound change, with a very particular set of conditions, has been highlighted as a d…
A Neighborly View: Water and Environmental History of the El Zotz Region
The Cambridge World History
From the fourth millennium BCE to the early second millennium CE the world became a world of cities. This volume explores this critical transformation, from the appearance of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the rise of cities in Asia and the Mediterranean world, Africa, and the Americas. Through case studies and comparative accounts of key cities across the world, leading scholars chart the ways in which these cities grew as nodal…
History (28 works) · Archaeology (25 works) · Art (24 works) · Latin American history and culture (19 works) · Maya (19 works) · History (18 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Geography (12 works) · Sociology (11 works)