Brown professor digs to free voices from distant past

DIGGING DEEP: Stephen Houston, professor of social science, anthropology and archaeology at Brown University, said archaeologists must be “clear-eyed and strategic.” / PHOTO COURTESY BROWN UNIVERSITY
DIGGING DEEP: Stephen Houston, professor of social science, anthropology and archaeology at Brown University, said archaeologists must be “clear-eyed and strategic.” / PHOTO COURTESY BROWN UNIVERSITY

Stephen Houston, who has been a professor of social science, anthropology and archaeology at Brown University in Providence for the last eight years, credits his “partly European” background and his parents’ love of history with developing his appreciation of all things past.
After studying anthropology and archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, he began a teaching career that eventually drew him to Brown for the university’s Ph.D. program.
When he hasn’t been teaching or writing, he’s been involved in archaeological digs in Scotland, Ireland, Mexico, Honduras and Philadelphia – where a team was working on excavating Colonial latrines.
But his most important field work clearly has been in leading a team at a Maya archaeological site in El Zotz, Guatemala, where last month they discovered a pyramid depicting the Maya sun god in a series of images in painted stucco that Houston believes will give researchers a “significant amount” of previously unknown insight into the Maya civilization.

PBN: Why a career in anthropology and archaeology and in teaching it?
HOUSTON: I remember being interested in this before I hit 8 years old. My mother was Swedish and we would spend most summers over there. My father took me to museums and ruin sites. I think it’s this feeling of a weighty past that most people ignore. It’s there, everywhere around and in us. Often those voices go unheard and I became interested at an early age in trying to hear those voices, and in ancient writing. That’s where the past really speaks most directly to us. [When I went to school] there were really no jobs [in this field]. The thought was that there would never be employment but I had to do it because I loved it.

PBN: Your research has focused on the Maya, a Mesoamerican civilization established beginning at about 2,000 BC and then flourished in what is now northern Central America – Guatemala, Belize and parts of El Salvador and Honduras – until the Spanish conquest beginning in the early 1500s. What is your interest there? HOUSTON: It’s one of the few literate civilizations. Parts of the writing had been understood [but] much of it was just beginning to become more transparent and more open in the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s. I was involved in many of the decipherments and code-breaking. It was deliriously exciting and those moments don’t come along in many fields very often.

PBN: What initially led you to this site?
HOUSTON: My interests are in royal courts – places where kings lived and commissioned great buildings of art and writing. There are a limited number of places like that, of course, so that’s inherently a restriction. This site is small so it’s also relatively manageable and you can answer your questions. Vast digging involves resources that are very hard to retain these days. What we’re looking at here is what the Maya did when dynasties came into existence and they founded kingdoms.

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PBN: What’s something about being an archaeologist that might surprise people?
HOUSTON: The drudgery and frequent physical misery. Of course I wouldn’t trade this life for another and I’ve been privileged to many things others can only remotely dream of doing. But the extraordinary becomes almost hum drum. If you’re digging, you have to be that way. You can’t approach it with the eagerness of a looter. It has to be clear-eyed and strategic.

PBN: What’s your next project?
HOUSTON: This project is continuing with other scholars but I’ve shifted more into the capacity of being an adviser. For every month you’re in the field, there’s six to eight months needed to analyze and write things up. After a while, if anyone does the math, you realize that you have to stop digging for a while. Right now … I have various intellectual book projects.

PBN: How much of what we see in mass media – including Mel Gibson’s 2006 film ‘Apocalypto’ which dramatized the arrival of the Spanish in Yucatan, Mexico, is true to what your research has shown?
HOUSTON: There were [so many] problems with that movie we won’t go there. There are several myths about the Maya people, one of which is that they have disappeared. They’re still here, although a very different people than lived in the classical times. Another would be that all the sites are known or explored. That’s not true. Many more will be investigated.

PBN: Where is the best place for a tourist to visit Mayan ruins?
HOUSTON: In Mexico, I would say it is jungle light. You can stay at very, very nice hotels but tourists near Cancun will not be getting that real experience. Guatemala is the place to go. The main city to visit would be Tikal (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) which you can see from our pyramid. It has great hotels nearby and you really immerse yourself in a jungle experience safely.

PBN: What would archaeologists digging up a long-forgotten United States 2,000 years from now think about our culture?
HOUSTON: That we are the people of trash, in respects symbolically and otherwise. Maya sites are in a sense unusually dirty because they did generate a lot of pottery which breaks and gets incorporated in deposits we break up but they have nothing on us for how much junk we generate. The level of consumption and pollution density is clearly unsustainable in the long term. •

INTERVIEW
Stephen Houston
POSITION: Dupee family professor of social science and professor of anthropology and archaeology, Brown University
BACKGROUND: After following his childhood dream of a career in anthropology and archaeology to faculty positions at Vanderbilt University and Brigham Young University, Houston joined the anthropology department at Brown in 2004. Since 2009, he has led a team of archaeologists on a dig at a Maya archaeological site in El Zotz, Guatemala, where in 2010 they uncovered a royal tomb filled with artifacts and human remains.
EDUCATION: Bachelor of arts in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, 1980; master of arts in anthropology, Yale University, 1982; Ph.D. in anthropology, Yale, 1987.
FIRST JOB: Washing dishes at a “food factory” in Carlisle, Pa.
RESIDENCE: Cranston
AGE: 53

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