David S. Stuart (born 1965) is an

archaeologist Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...

and

epigrapher Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...

specializing in the study of ancient

Mesoamerica Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area in southern North America and most of Central America. It extends from approximately central Mexico through Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. W ...

, the area now called

Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...

and

Central America Central America ( es, América Central or ) is a subregion of the Americas. Its boundaries are defined as bordering the United States to the north, Colombia to the south, the Caribbean Sea to the east, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. ...

. His work has studied all aspects of the ancient

Maya Maya may refer to: Civilizations * Maya peoples, of southern Mexico and northern Central America ** Maya civilization, the historical civilization of the Maya peoples ** Maya language, the languages of the Maya peoples * Maya (Ethiopia), a populat ...

civilization. He is widely recognized for his breakthroughs in deciphering Maya hieroglyphs and interpreting Maya art and iconography, starting at an early age. He is the youngest person ever to receive a

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the MacArthur Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to ...

, at age 18. He currently teaches at the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

and his current research includes study of

Aztec The Aztecs () were a Mesoamerican culture that flourished in central Mexico in the post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different Indigenous peoples of Mexico, ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those g ...

and ancient Mesoamerican images and texts.

Early life

He is the son of the archaeologist George E. Stuart and the writer, artist and illustrator Gene Strickland Stuart, both of whom wrote extensively for the National Geographic Society. He spent much of his childhood accompanying his parents on archaeological digs and expeditions in Mexico and Guatemala. There he developed a deep interest in Maya culture, especially their art and hieroglyphs, reading scholarly works beginning at age 10. Shortly thereafter he made original contributions to the field of decipherment and began working closely with the noted Mayanist

Linda Schele Linda Schele (October 30, 1942 – April 18, 1998) was an American Mesoamerican archaeologist who was an expert in the field of Maya epigraphy and iconography. She played an invaluable role in the decipherment of much of the Maya hieroglyphs. She ...

. Stuart gave his first scholarly paper at the age of 12 at the 1978 Mesa Redonda de Palenque, an international conference of Mesoamerican scholars.

Research

Stuart is best known for his discoveries on the nature of Maya hieroglyphic writing from the 1980s to the present. By 1985 scholars had already generally recognized that there were two types of signs in the script: logograms (word signs) and syllables (consonant-vowel or CV). However, only a limited amount of Maya texts could be read in their original language, Classic Mayan, due to an imprecise understanding of the visual nature of the script, especially the ways signs formed and combined. Stuart demonstrated that signs could have a great many variants and forms, all visually distinct yet functionally equivalent. The recognition of the principles behind graphic variation and structure helped lead to a number of breakthroughs. Stuart proposed the decipherments of many new syllables and logograms in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn provided a more firm basis for a new wave of linguistic analyses of Maya texts during the 1990s and early 2000s. Stuart has also contributed a number of studies of Maya art, history and religion, especially at the sites of

Copán Copán is an archaeological site of the Maya civilization in the Copán Department of western Honduras, not far from the border with Guatemala. This ancient Maya city mirrors the beauty of the physical landscape in which it flourished—a fert ...

Palenque Palenque (; Yucatec Maya language, Yucatec Maya: ), also anciently known in the Itza Language as Lakamhaʼ ("Big Water or Big Waters"), was a Maya city City-state, state in southern Mexico that perished in the 8th century. The Palenque ruins dat ...

Tikal Tikal () (''Tik’al'' in modern Mayan orthography) is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in a rainforest in Guatemala. It is one of the largest archeological sites and urban centers of the pre-Co ...

La Corona La Corona is the name given by archaeologists to an ancient Maya court residence in Guatemala's Petén department that was discovered in 1996, and later identified as the long-sought "Site Q", the source of a long series of unprovenanced limest ...

, San Bartolo and

Xultun Xultún is a large Maya archaeological site located 40 km northeast of Tikal and 8 km south of the smaller Preclassic site of San Bartolo in northern Guatemala. Site The site, which once supported a considerable population, has a 35 m t ...

. in the late 1990s he produced a new interpretation of the history surrounding the Teotihuacan's "arrival" to the Maya area in 378 CE, proposing this was a military overthrow of the local Tikal king, and the establishment of a new political order. Much of Stuart's work focused on the field documentation of Maya sculpture and inscriptions at numerous sites, through epigraphic drawing and photography. He remains actively engaged as a member of several ongoing excavation projects in Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. Recently Stuart has developed new research in the iconography and script of central Mexico, especially among the

Mexica The Mexica (Nahuatl: , ;''Nahuatl Dictionary.'' (1990). Wired Humanities Project. University of Oregon. Retrieved August 29, 2012, frolink/ref> singular ) were a Nahuatl-speaking indigenous people of the Valley of Mexico who were the rulers of ...

. In 2018 he presented a new and controversial interpretation of the so-called Calendar Stone of Tenochtitlan, suggesting it is not an image of an Aztec deity, but rather a deified portrait of the emperor

Moctezuma II Moctezuma Xocoyotzin ( – 29 June 1520; oteːkˈsoːmaḁ ʃoːkoˈjoːt͡sĩn̥), nci-IPA, Motēuczōmah Xōcoyōtzin, moteːkʷˈsoːma ʃoːkoˈjoːtsin variant spellings include Motewksomah, Motecuhzomatzin, Montezuma, Moteuczoma, Motecu ...

as the sun. Stuart emphasizes its role as a political monument and image, the purpose of which was to depict the Tenochca ruler at the center of the cosmos.

Career

Stuart's early work on the decipherment of Maya writing led to a

in 1984. He is the youngest-ever recipient of that award. Stuart continues to make major contributions in the field of

epigraphy Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...

, particularly related to the decipherment of the

Maya script Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs, is historically the native writing system of the Maya civilization of Mesoamerica and is the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered. The earliest inscriptions found which ...

used by the

pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, th ...

Maya civilization The Maya civilization () of the Mesoamerican people is known by its ancient temples and glyphs. Its Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. It is also noted for its art, archit ...

. See for example Coe (1992), p. 231 et seq. His insights into the structure and content of Maya hieroglyphic writing was highlighted in the award-winning documentary film "Breaking the Maya Code" (Night Fire Films, 2008). After completing his B.A. in Art and Archaeology at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

in 1989, Stuart received his Ph.D in Anthropology from

Vanderbilt University Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million ...

in 1995. At that time he was appointed the Bartlett Curator of Maya Hieroglyphs at the Peabody Museum at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

, and was a senior lecturer at Harvard's Department of Anthropology before beginning at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004. His many publications include ''Ten Phonetic Syllables'' (1987), which laid much of the groundwork for the now-accepted methodology of Maya hieroglyphic decipherment. In 2003 he published a volume in the ongoing ''Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions'' series (Peabody Museum, Harvard University), devoted to drawings and photographs of sculpture from

Piedras Negras Piedras Negras may refer to: * Piedras Negras, Coahuila, a city in the state of Coahuila, Mexico ** Piedras Negras Municipality, a municipality in Mexico, with the center in the eponymous city * Piedras Negras (Maya site) Piedras Negras is the ...

, Guatemala. He co-authored ''Palenque: Eternal City of the Maya'' (Thames and Hudson, 2008) with his father, George Stuart. His book ''The Order of Days '' (Random House, 2011) explored the important role of time and cosmology in Classic Maya civilization, while also debunking the

2012 phenomenon The 2012 phenomenon was a range of eschatological beliefs that cataclysmic or transformative events would occur on or around 21 December 2012. This date was regarded as the end-date of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count cale ...

claim that the Maya viewed 2012 as the end of their elaborate calendar. At present he is working on a new book which will offer a detailed analysis of the three temples of the Cross Group complex at Palenque. Stuart is currently the director of The Mesoamerica Center at The University of Texas at Austin, which fosters multi-disciplinary studies on ancient American art and culture. He also oversees the activities of the Casa Herrera, UT's academic research center in Antigua, Guatemala, devoted to studies in the art, archaeology and culture of wider Mesoamerica.

Bibliography

* ''Ten Phonetic Syllables'' (1987) * ''Classic Maya Place Names'' (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1994) with Stephen Houston * ''Piedras Negras'', Vol. 9, part 1, i
''Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Inscriptions'' series
(Peabody Museum, Harvard University), 2003, with Ian Graham * ''The Inscriptions from Temple XIX at Palenque'' (The Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, 2005) * ''Palenque: Eternal City of the Maya'' (Thames and Hudson, 2008) with George Stuart * ''The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya'' (University of Texas Press, 2011) with Stephen Houston and Karl Taube * ''The Order of Days: The Maya World and the Truth about 2012'' (Random House – Harmony, 2011)

References

External links