Dear Member of the Société des américanistes,

We are pleased to invite you to the next conference of la Société des Américanistes  on Thursday, September 10, 2026, at 6:00 p.m. in the salle de cinéma at the musée du Quai Branly. This conference is co-organized with the Grand programme PSL Les Fabriques de l’Antique.

 

Stephen Houston (Brown University), will present:

Rhythms of Recall : Maya Writing and the People Beyond Memory

The Classic Maya of Mexico and Central America wrote about events and people beyond living memory. The very distant were gods in primordial time. Other figures existed only a century or two before those who commissioned such records. In between were semi-mythic persons. Living when cities barely existed, they were, from our vantage point today, both real and fictional, like kings but with impossibly long lives and unusual traits. All reflect how the Maya constructed the past in relation to their own time, its dynastic and ritual concerns, and the buildings and spaces they devised with care. This history, composed by them, interpreted by scholars today, can be understood as moments that seem fixed, but were nonetheless subject to endless reworking, contrastive repetition, and selective forgetting.

 

The conference will be held in English.