Stephen Houston's Impact on Maya Archaeology: Celebrating His Completion of 3 K'atuns

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Stephen Douglas Houston was drawn to archaeology and ancient scripts from a young age, fascinated by the rune stones of his mother’s native Sweden. While he is most widely seen as an epigrapher to outsiders, Mayanists recognize that he is, in fact, a world class field archaeologist that knows where to dig to answer anthropological questions, and is not afraid to get his own hands dirty. Houston’s intellect possesses an insatiable curiosity, which means that he has given his informed opinion on a number of important debates in archaeology, shaping and advancing academic discourse. Even with such lofty credentials, he has always made the mentoring of young scholars a priority, which also keeps him on top of the most current theories, debates, and methods that are emerging in Maya archaeology. In this paper, I will reflect on my ten years working with Steve at El Zotz. In that time, he has dramatically influenced my existing views on remote sensing, GIS, and digital technologies in general. In our most recent work using lidar data, Steve has pushed me beyond settlement pattern analysis and has helped me see how this technology is changing our understanding of the ancient Maya at many levels.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23035