Stephen Houston | Brown University (original) (raw)
Papers by Stephen Houston
https://mayadecipherment.com/2023/08/21/design-transfer-and-the-classic-maya/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2023/10/24/seeing-blindness/
In 1560, a pictorial census was compiled for the province of Huexotzinco in what is now the Mexic... more In 1560, a pictorial census was compiled for the province of Huexotzinco in what is now the Mexican state of Puebla (Aguilera 1996:529). Taxation-or its avoidance-was the aim. Known today as the Matrícula de Huexotzinco, this document arose from local complaints about burdens on Indigenous nobility (Prem 1974:708-9). The census seems to have done its job. Don Luis de Velasco y Ruiz de Alarcón, the second Viceroy of New Spain, cited it when turning down later attempts to tax native elites in the area.
https://mayadecipherment.com/2023/12/21/tikal-tecali-teotihuacan/
Alabaster was a rarity among the Classic Maya, reserved for fine bowls in elite settings, especia... more Alabaster was a rarity among the Classic Maya, reserved for fine bowls in elite settings, especially tombs or palaces (Houston 2014:258; Kubler 1977:5n1). Known as xix, a spelling attested in at least two glyphic texts, it appeared to refer to rocks affected by water (Houston et al. 2018; Luin et al. 2022:907, fig. 4). Geologically, xix is a white sedimentary calcite (CaCO3) mined in, among other places, a source near Zinacantan, Chiapas (Berlin 1946:27; for other quarries, see Urcid 2010:fig. 56). A comparable term, tecali, named after a community of that name, was applied to banded stone of similar composition in Mexico (Diehl and Stroh 1978:74). The Maya evidently prized the translucency, crystalline texture, and hard, white surface of alabaster, the better to highlight delicate incisions that could be filled in with red pigment.
The Devil’s Writing April 6, 2024mayoid Stephen Houston and Felipe Rojas (Brown University) The Spaniards expressed a certain ambivalence about Maya glyphs. They called them letras, a neutral word suggesting an equivalence to their own writing system. But they could also describe the script in...
The Spaniards expressed a certain ambivalence about Maya glyphs. They called them letras, a neutr... more The Spaniards expressed a certain ambivalence about Maya glyphs. They called them letras, a neutral word suggesting an equivalence to their own writing system. But they could also describe the script in terms of caracteres. This implied, among other nuances, a cipher or emblem of magical import (Drucker 2022:61-62; Hanks 2010:3).[1] At the time, charaktêres, an obvious cognate with caracteres, were mystical signs created by adding circles or other embellishments to preexisting scripts (Gordon 2014:266-67). Devoid of grammar, often written for single use, they were thought to be "unutterable," being visionary in origin and direct conduits to mystical meaning (Gordon 2014:263). John Dee, the Elizabethan-era occultist, even claimed to have received his own esoteric script from angels (Harkness 1999:166). Maya glyphs, by contrast, were understood to be legible if challenging to read. Like other writing, they recorded, among their quite varied content, "the deeds of each king's ancestors" and reports of "years, wars, pestilences, hurricanes, inundations, hungers" (Houston et al. 2001:26, 40).
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/04/06/the-devils-writing/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/04/06/the-devils-writing/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/05/28/a-fraternity-of-scribes-on-a-maya-plate/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/05/28/a-fraternity-of-scribes-on-a-maya-plate/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/07/02/jeweled-stones-and-detachable-finery/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/07/02/jeweled-stones-and-detachable-finery/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/08/06/a-good-hot-meal-notes-to-a-culinary-history/, 2024
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/08/06/a-good-hot-meal-notes-to-a-culinary-history/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/08/11/citational-rise-and-fall-in-maya-studies/, 2024
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/08/11/citational-rise-and-fall-in-maya-studies/
Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Ancient Maya Writing and Iconography, Jun 15, 2017
This paper reviews recent archaeological and epigraphic discoveries to propose the decipherment o... more This paper reviews recent archaeological and epigraphic discoveries to propose the decipherment of the Classic Maya logogram PAAT “crested lizard, basilisk”. Lowland Mayan languages provide several supportive glosses (especially Ch'orti' aj pat “lizard” and Yucatec ah pach “lagarto coronado con cresta y macho”). We also propose that this animal's name stems ultimately from *paat, the widespread Mayan term for "back". We note that the basilisk was evidently a favored subject for noble anthroponyms, appearing in the names of lords of La Corona and Bonampak/Lacanha, among a few others, and the basilisk itself appears with some frequency in sacrificial and feasting scenes in Maya iconography.
Latin American Antiquity
Aquí presentamos el descubrimiento de una banca jeroglífica esculpida del sitio maya de Ixtutz, P... more 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 County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, pertenecen al mismo trono, y llamamos para su repatriación voluntaria a Guatemala.
Latin American Antiquity, 2021
Aquí presentamos el descubrimiento de una banca jeroglífica esculpida del sitio maya de Ixtutz, P... more 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 County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, pertenecen al mismo trono, y llamamos para su repatriación voluntaria a Guatemala. We present here the discovery of a sculptured hieroglyphic throne from the Maya site of Ixtutz, Petén, Guatemala. We analyze the hieroglyphic inscription on the throne and discuss the history of the object in the context of its production, its subsequent dismantling and reuse, and the removal of some pieces from the site. We show that two inscribed limestone blocks, one in a private collection in Brussels and the ot...
Antiquity
Lidar reveals the presence of a precinct at the Classic Maya city of Tikal that probably reproduc... more Lidar reveals the presence of a precinct at the Classic Maya city of Tikal that probably reproduces the Ciudadela and Temple of the Feathered Serpent at the imperial capital of Teotihuacan.
L'Homme
Parmi les systemes d’ecriture mixtes, logo-phonetiques, se distinguent les ecritures hieroglyphi... more Parmi les systemes d’ecriture mixtes, logo-phonetiques, se distinguent les ecritures hieroglyphiques. Afin de determiner ce qui fait le propre de celles-ci, nous considerons les deux grandes traditions, historiquement independantes, d’ecriture hieroglyphique : maya et egyptienne. Les ecritures hieroglyphiques se caracterisent par leur pictorialite, maintenue a travers le temps, et par des signes dont les formes ne sont pas reductibles a une combinaison de lignes ou de traits (ni, donc, a des polices typographiques). Ces ecritures sont etroitement integrees a une culture esthetique plus large et constituent un mode de communication visuelle dense et encyclopedique. Les pratiques, dans lesquelles on reconnait des metadiscours implicites, impliquent des ideologies de l’ecriture hieroglyphique fondamentalement differentes de celles d’instrumentalite et de transparence, souvent associees a l’ecriture alphabetique. Les signes hieroglyphiques ne sont pas seulement vecteurs de valeurs linguistiques : ils sont eux-memes des entites inviolables, suggerant une ontologie et une capacite d’action specifiques. De maniere inherente, l’ecriture hieroglyphique est excessive, tant sur le plan visuel que semantique – une dimension qui peut etre diversement accentuee selon les contextes. A la fois ouvertes et exclusives, les deux traditions d’ecriture hieroglyphique se sont developpees pendant des millenaires dans des societes diverses et en mutation, en un lien indissociable avec leurs cultures esthetiques et visions du monde de ces societes.
Res: Anthropology and aesthetics
Journal of Field Archaeology
Journal of Field Archaeology, 2020
https://mayadecipherment.com/2023/08/21/design-transfer-and-the-classic-maya/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2023/10/24/seeing-blindness/
In 1560, a pictorial census was compiled for the province of Huexotzinco in what is now the Mexic... more In 1560, a pictorial census was compiled for the province of Huexotzinco in what is now the Mexican state of Puebla (Aguilera 1996:529). Taxation-or its avoidance-was the aim. Known today as the Matrícula de Huexotzinco, this document arose from local complaints about burdens on Indigenous nobility (Prem 1974:708-9). The census seems to have done its job. Don Luis de Velasco y Ruiz de Alarcón, the second Viceroy of New Spain, cited it when turning down later attempts to tax native elites in the area.
https://mayadecipherment.com/2023/12/21/tikal-tecali-teotihuacan/
Alabaster was a rarity among the Classic Maya, reserved for fine bowls in elite settings, especia... more Alabaster was a rarity among the Classic Maya, reserved for fine bowls in elite settings, especially tombs or palaces (Houston 2014:258; Kubler 1977:5n1). Known as xix, a spelling attested in at least two glyphic texts, it appeared to refer to rocks affected by water (Houston et al. 2018; Luin et al. 2022:907, fig. 4). Geologically, xix is a white sedimentary calcite (CaCO3) mined in, among other places, a source near Zinacantan, Chiapas (Berlin 1946:27; for other quarries, see Urcid 2010:fig. 56). A comparable term, tecali, named after a community of that name, was applied to banded stone of similar composition in Mexico (Diehl and Stroh 1978:74). The Maya evidently prized the translucency, crystalline texture, and hard, white surface of alabaster, the better to highlight delicate incisions that could be filled in with red pigment.
The Devil’s Writing April 6, 2024mayoid Stephen Houston and Felipe Rojas (Brown University) The Spaniards expressed a certain ambivalence about Maya glyphs. They called them letras, a neutral word suggesting an equivalence to their own writing system. But they could also describe the script in...
The Spaniards expressed a certain ambivalence about Maya glyphs. They called them letras, a neutr... more The Spaniards expressed a certain ambivalence about Maya glyphs. They called them letras, a neutral word suggesting an equivalence to their own writing system. But they could also describe the script in terms of caracteres. This implied, among other nuances, a cipher or emblem of magical import (Drucker 2022:61-62; Hanks 2010:3).[1] At the time, charaktêres, an obvious cognate with caracteres, were mystical signs created by adding circles or other embellishments to preexisting scripts (Gordon 2014:266-67). Devoid of grammar, often written for single use, they were thought to be "unutterable," being visionary in origin and direct conduits to mystical meaning (Gordon 2014:263). John Dee, the Elizabethan-era occultist, even claimed to have received his own esoteric script from angels (Harkness 1999:166). Maya glyphs, by contrast, were understood to be legible if challenging to read. Like other writing, they recorded, among their quite varied content, "the deeds of each king's ancestors" and reports of "years, wars, pestilences, hurricanes, inundations, hungers" (Houston et al. 2001:26, 40).
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/04/06/the-devils-writing/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/04/06/the-devils-writing/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/05/28/a-fraternity-of-scribes-on-a-maya-plate/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/05/28/a-fraternity-of-scribes-on-a-maya-plate/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/07/02/jeweled-stones-and-detachable-finery/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/07/02/jeweled-stones-and-detachable-finery/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/08/06/a-good-hot-meal-notes-to-a-culinary-history/, 2024
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/08/06/a-good-hot-meal-notes-to-a-culinary-history/
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/08/11/citational-rise-and-fall-in-maya-studies/, 2024
https://mayadecipherment.com/2024/08/11/citational-rise-and-fall-in-maya-studies/
Maya Decipherment: Ideas on Ancient Maya Writing and Iconography, Jun 15, 2017
This paper reviews recent archaeological and epigraphic discoveries to propose the decipherment o... more This paper reviews recent archaeological and epigraphic discoveries to propose the decipherment of the Classic Maya logogram PAAT “crested lizard, basilisk”. Lowland Mayan languages provide several supportive glosses (especially Ch'orti' aj pat “lizard” and Yucatec ah pach “lagarto coronado con cresta y macho”). We also propose that this animal's name stems ultimately from *paat, the widespread Mayan term for "back". We note that the basilisk was evidently a favored subject for noble anthroponyms, appearing in the names of lords of La Corona and Bonampak/Lacanha, among a few others, and the basilisk itself appears with some frequency in sacrificial and feasting scenes in Maya iconography.
Latin American Antiquity
Aquí presentamos el descubrimiento de una banca jeroglífica esculpida del sitio maya de Ixtutz, P... more 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 County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, pertenecen al mismo trono, y llamamos para su repatriación voluntaria a Guatemala.
Latin American Antiquity, 2021
Aquí presentamos el descubrimiento de una banca jeroglífica esculpida del sitio maya de Ixtutz, P... more 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 County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, pertenecen al mismo trono, y llamamos para su repatriación voluntaria a Guatemala. We present here the discovery of a sculptured hieroglyphic throne from the Maya site of Ixtutz, Petén, Guatemala. We analyze the hieroglyphic inscription on the throne and discuss the history of the object in the context of its production, its subsequent dismantling and reuse, and the removal of some pieces from the site. We show that two inscribed limestone blocks, one in a private collection in Brussels and the ot...
Antiquity
Lidar reveals the presence of a precinct at the Classic Maya city of Tikal that probably reproduc... more Lidar reveals the presence of a precinct at the Classic Maya city of Tikal that probably reproduces the Ciudadela and Temple of the Feathered Serpent at the imperial capital of Teotihuacan.
L'Homme
Parmi les systemes d’ecriture mixtes, logo-phonetiques, se distinguent les ecritures hieroglyphi... more Parmi les systemes d’ecriture mixtes, logo-phonetiques, se distinguent les ecritures hieroglyphiques. Afin de determiner ce qui fait le propre de celles-ci, nous considerons les deux grandes traditions, historiquement independantes, d’ecriture hieroglyphique : maya et egyptienne. Les ecritures hieroglyphiques se caracterisent par leur pictorialite, maintenue a travers le temps, et par des signes dont les formes ne sont pas reductibles a une combinaison de lignes ou de traits (ni, donc, a des polices typographiques). Ces ecritures sont etroitement integrees a une culture esthetique plus large et constituent un mode de communication visuelle dense et encyclopedique. Les pratiques, dans lesquelles on reconnait des metadiscours implicites, impliquent des ideologies de l’ecriture hieroglyphique fondamentalement differentes de celles d’instrumentalite et de transparence, souvent associees a l’ecriture alphabetique. Les signes hieroglyphiques ne sont pas seulement vecteurs de valeurs linguistiques : ils sont eux-memes des entites inviolables, suggerant une ontologie et une capacite d’action specifiques. De maniere inherente, l’ecriture hieroglyphique est excessive, tant sur le plan visuel que semantique – une dimension qui peut etre diversement accentuee selon les contextes. A la fois ouvertes et exclusives, les deux traditions d’ecriture hieroglyphique se sont developpees pendant des millenaires dans des societes diverses et en mutation, en un lien indissociable avec leurs cultures esthetiques et visions du monde de ces societes.
Res: Anthropology and aesthetics
Journal of Field Archaeology
Journal of Field Archaeology, 2020
Arqueología Mexicana, 2019
, with support from the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society and the Center in Paris, both ... more , with support from the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society and the Center in Paris, both of that university. A separate presentation was made possible by my good colleagues Andréas Stauder and David Klotz, as part of a conference I organized with them in the eikones NCCR Iconic Criticism program at Universität Basel. John Bodel, Steve Chrisomalis, and Simon Martin were most helpful with comments and editorial suggestions, and John Baines contributed, at his usual rapid pacea better correspondent is hard to findtimely expertise on an Egyptian sculpture highlighted here. Claudia Brittenham and Sarah Newman gave the manuscript an especially close reading, and Mallory Matsumoto and Andrew Scherer supplied further good advice. Another version, given in a conference leading to this book, was co-organized with John Bodel and hosted by the Program in Early Cultures at Brown University. Sam Butler contributed with editorial help. Note that all European correlations with the Maya calendar are Julian dates, in the Martin-Skidmore correlation.
De olfato. Aproximaciones a los olores en la historia de México, 2020