Talk: SAR Humanities Festival: Stephen D. Houston: Re-Cracking the Code

Film, Talk, Discussion

Re-Cracking the Code: The Continuing Adventure of Maya Decipherment

Stephen D. Houston, speaker

Cracking the Maya Code (2008, 54 minutes)

Can a code be cracked once? Or does it happen again and again, incrementally, in an ongoing process? Maya writing offers a test case. Created over 2400 years ago, it consists of 100s of signs that have both gradually and suddenly released their secrets. It is the most complex system of writing ever produced in ancestral America. Every year brings a new find, a fresh discovery. As a documentary, Breaking the Maya Code represents a moment in that process, not untrue but an incomplete story. Houston will bring this account up to the present, revealing what is known and what awaits us in a thrilling intellectual adventure.

Stephen D. Houston (Inaugural Barbara Tedlock Fellow at SAR) is the Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. A former MacArthur Fellow, Dr. Houston is a leading scholar of Mesoamerica, particularly on the Classic Maya of Mexico and Central America. He has led major archaeological excavations at sites like Piedras Negras and El Zotz in Guatemala, contributing to a greater understanding of Maya court life and ritual. Houston is also a leading expert in the decipherment and interpretation of ancient scripts. His many books and articles span topics from epigraphy and architecture to the history of communication and the disappearance of writing systems. For that work, the President of Guatemala awarded him that country’s highest honor, the Order of the Quetzal in the grade of Grand Cross.