"Inventory", the 2025-2026 Annual Report of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, is now available online.

The Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World welcomes Professor Shanti Morell-Hart, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World, to the Institute's Academic Faculty.

The Joukowsky Institute welcomes our newest Faculty Fellows, Michael Satlow (Professor of Judaic and Religious Studies) and Catherine Nuckols (International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art and Architecture and the Cogut Institute for Humanities).

The Joukowsky Institute congratulates our faculty members, Laurel Bestock and Andrew Scherer, on their new positions.

The Joukowsky Fieldwork Fund was established in memory of Professor Martha Sharp Joukowsky and Chancellor Artemis A.W. Joukowsky for their many contributions to Brown University and the field of archaeology. The fund was created by the generous support of former students, colleagues, and family and ensures that all undergraduate students at Brown have the opportunity to conduct research in field archaeology.

JIAAW doctoral student Max Peers successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on April 22, 2025

As the culminating project of Fighting Pharaohs: Ancient Egyptian Warfare, more than 90 Brown students participated in a student-led, live-action reconstruction of the 13th-century B.C.E. Battle of Kadesh.

JIAAW doctoral student Sarah Bell successfully defended her doctoral dissertation on Monday, April 14, 2025.

The Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World (JIAAW) is accepting collaborative proposals for a symposium to be held in the spring semester of 2026.

The Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World (JIAAW) at Brown University invites applications for the position of Postdoctoral Research Associate in Archaeology and the Ancient World.

"Substance of the Ancient Maya: Kingdoms and Communities, Objects and Beings," edited by Andrew K. Scherer and Thomas G. Garrison, collects twelve essays by top scholars that highlight what is new in research pertaining to the ancient Maya. Subjects range from updated political histories of major kingdoms in the southern Maya Lowlands to explorations of the nature of Maya writing and materiality. These essays were inspired by the scholarship of Stephen Houston and celebrate his transdisciplinary commitment to research in anthropological archaeology, epigraphy, and art history.

The contributions in this volume are organized into two sections that respectively reflect different scales from which to approach the substance of the ancient Maya—from hand-held objects to entire kingdoms. This dichotomy reflects the breadth of questions central to current research on the Maya. It also illustrates how certain themes, such as the relationship between the living and the realm of the supernatural, are fundamental to both thinking by and about the Maya at all scales. A diversity of methods is not only embodied by this assemblage of essays but is also spread equally across the two sections of the book, illustrating that archaeologists, epigraphers, geographers, and art historians can equally contribute to the substance of kingdoms and communities, as they can to objects and beings.

Collectively, these contributions show how the objects and beings that composed the Classic Maya world were both literal and sacred substances that mediated relations not only among living people but with gods and ancestors. A final chapter by Stephen Houston reflects on unfinished projects of the ancient Maya as a metaphor for all of the work yet to be done to move forward in our studies of the past.

Andrew K. Scherer is the director of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and an associate professor of anthropology and archaeology at Brown University.

Thomas G. Garrison is an assistant professor of geography and the environment and the director of the Lidar and Landscapes of the Ancient Mediterranean and Americas (LLAMA) Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the lead editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of the Maya.