Apocalypse later

IDEAS: You grew up among Mayanists and Maya-your parents were archaeologists.

STUART: When I was 8 or 9, I had this transformative experience, which was driving to Mexico and living in a Maya village. It was very jarring, physically and mentally. We ended up living in a grass hut, and I remember for the first couple of weeks I just hated it. It was hot. There were bugs. No electricity. No running water. But in about three weeks I loved it and I didn’t want to leave.

IDEAS: What keeps you interested in studying them?

STUART: There’s always something new and transformative coming out … .Right now, there are two or three things going on that are very exciting, that are going to change our ideas of how these people thought about history and religion, and that’s just come about in the past few months. There aren’t that many fields that have this kind of energy that’s always pumped into it. It used to be dominated by Europeans and Americans, but people in Mexico and Guatemala are getting into it, so there’s a lot of dialogue going on that’s totally fresh.

IDEAS: And there are many sites yet to be explored, right?

STUART: Sure. I don’t know that we can say there are any more lost cities, but, and it’s hard to stick numbers on, but about 90 percent of Maya ruins haven’t been excavated. A good deal of them are out in cow pastures or in deep jungle. Even the most famous ones we know so little about, whether it’s Tikal or Chichen Itzá; there’ve been maybe a couple of generations of archaeologists that have worked on sites that took in some cases 15 centuries to grow and evolve. So yeah, there’s lifetimes’ worth of work.

J. Gabriel Boylan is an assistant editor of Harper’s Magazine.