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George E. Stuart
George E. Stuart of Barnardsville, North Carolina, has been active in archaeology since his youth. He has done fieldwork in South Carolina, Georgia, and the Maya Area of southeastern Mexico and Central America over the past 60 years. He has also lectured extensively on the archaeology, hieroglyphic writing, and art history of the Maya—and on Southeastern North America. His writings, both academic and popular, include eight books and more than 40 articles, among them the Mysterious Maya, Lost Kingdoms of the Maya, and Ancient Pioneers, the latter dubbed by one reviewer as “one of the best general works on American archaeology ever produced.” His most recent book, Palenque: Eternal City of the Maya, was co-authored with his son David Stuart, the Linda and David Schele Professor of Ancient Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas, Austin.
During his nearly 40 years with the National Geographic Society, George Stuart served as cartographic designer, as editor for archaeology at the National Geographic magazine, and as Chairman of the Committee for Research and Exploration, he oversaw the granting of over four million dollars a year for scientific fieldwork around the world.
Stuart received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1975. In 1984 he founded the Center for Maya Research, now the Boundary End Archaeology Research Center, a not-for-profit organization that helps to promote research related to the archaeology, art, and writing systems of ancient America. He continues as president of that organization, and as Editor-in-Chief of two peer-reviewed scholarly journals, Research Reports on Ancient Maya Writing and Ancient America. Stuart also serves as a trustee of Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, North Carolina; a member of the North Carolina Humanities Council; and advisor to the Jamestown Rediscovery project of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.
George Stuart has received many awards, among them the Tatiana Prokouriakoff Award from Harvard University; two presidential awards from the Society for American Archaeology for his work in public education; the Orden del Pop (“Order of the Royal Mat”) from Francisco Marroquín University, Guatemala, for his contributions to the archaeology that nation; and the honorary title of Edutsi (“Teacher” in Cherokee) for his 12 years of work with the Lak’ech Native American study group in Pleasant Valley State Prison, Coalinga, California.
In Barnardsville, George and his wife Melinda, a former museum curator and historian of American culture, built the Boundary End Archaeology Research Center and its library of some 13,000 books, manuscripts, and photographs on American archaeology, with emphasis on the Maya and the North American Southeast. The Stuart Collection is now being transferred to the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where it will be the focus of a recently established Kenan Eminent Professorship, held by Patricia McAnany, and readily and permanently accessible to students, faculty, and the interested public.
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Maya at the Playa
American Foreign Academic Research and The Archaeological Institute of America
September 30 - October 3, 2010
