David Stuart (born 1965) is a Mayanist scholar and professor of Mesoamerican art and writing at the University of Texas at Austin.
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He is the son of Mayanist scholars George Stuart and Gene S. Stuart. He began researching Maya hieroglyphs at the age of 8, and since an early age worked closely with Linda Schele.
His early work on the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs led to a MacArthur Fellowship in 1984, at the age of 18. He is the youngest-ever recipient of that award. Stuart has made major contributions in the field of epigraphy, particularly related to the decipherment of the Maya script used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica. See for example Coe (1992), p. 231 et seq. Stuart was featured in the 1988 PBS series, The Second Voyage of the Mimi, starring a young Ben Affleck.
He received his Ph.D in Anthropology from Vanderbilt University in 1995, and taught at Harvard University before beginning at UT Austin in 2004. Stuart has conducted field research at numerous archaeological sites in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, mostly focusing on the documentation of Maya sculpture and inscriptions. He remains actively engaged as a member of several excavation projects.
His 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, Guatemala. His co-authored Palenque: Eternal City of the Maya (Thames and Hudson, 2008) with his father, George Stuart. Recently his research and contributions to Maya studies were featured in the award-winning PBS documentary Cracking the Maya Code (NightFire Films, 2008). His most recent work, The Order of Days (Random House - Harmony, 2011) explores the important role of time for the classical Mayan civilization, while debunking the 2012 phenomenon claim that Mayans view the year 2012 as an end of the world.
Stuart is 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 newly established Casa Herrera, UT's new academic research center in Antigua, Guatemala, devoted to studies in the art, archaeology and culture of Mesoamerica. He is the Linda and David Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at UT.