May 14, 2022 Dr. David Stuart: “The Speaking Steps: Reconstructing Narrative and Image on the Great Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copan.”
The Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copan is famous for being the longest inscription from the Maya world. But most of the text was discovered in fallen blocks, hopeless out of their original order and placement. Beginning in the 1980s, a concerted effort began to conserve and reconstruct the jumbled portions of the text, using old photographic records and new insights into Maya epigraphy. This talk summarized these collaborative efforts, which Stuart has been a part of since 1986. Today, the end is in sight for the reconstruction and publication of the Hieroglyphic Stairway, as best as we can understand it.
David Stuart is the David and Linda Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Vanderbilt University in 1995, and taught at Harvard before arriving at the University of Texas at Austin in 2004, where he now teaches in the Department of Art and Art History. His interests in the traditional cultures of Mesoamerica are wide-ranging, but his primary research focuses on the archaeology and epigraphy of ancient Maya civilization, and for the past three decades he has been very active in the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing. His major research centers on the art and epigraphy at Copan, Palenque, La Corona, and San Bartolo. More recently he has been active in the study of Aztec art and hieroglyphs. Stuart’s early work on the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs led to a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984. In 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a UNESCO Lifetime Achievement Award. His books include Palenque: Eternal City of the Maya, The Order of Days: Unlocking the Secrets of the Ancient Maya, and just released, King and Cosmos: A New Interpretation of the Aztec Calendar Stone.