Linda Schele:
Decoding the Maya Glyphs
 |
 |
|
Linda Schele was a world-renowned scholar of Maya art and writing, and when she died of cancer in 1998, she was at the forefront of the decoding of Maya hieroglyphics. Her contributions to the evolution of that field in the last three decades of the 20th century were vitally important. At the time of her death, she was the John D. Murchison Regents Professor of Art in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, where she had taught for 18 years. She made the study of the Maya a focus for scores of undergraduate and graduate students. In addition, she was at the center of a community of scholars and lay persons outside the University who came together for the annual Maya Meetings at Texas, a forum she had pioneered in 1977 as the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshops. Born in 1942 in Nashville, Tennessee, she studied art and education at the University of Cincinnati (B.F.A. with honors and B.S. in education, both 1964; M.F.A. in art, 1968). In 1968 she married David Schele and began a teaching career in studio art at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, remaining there until 1980. In 1970, Linda Schele's career took a sudden turn in a new direction when she and her husband made a trip to photograph the Maya ruins in Yucat?. As Linda later described it: "I once was a fair to middling painter who went on a Christmas trip to Mexico and came back an art historian and a Mayanist." That casual visit to the ruins of Palenque was a turning point: "I fell in love with the place," she wrote, "and found myself obsessed about learning who had built it, why, when, and how." 
While touring Palenque, Schele met Merle Greene Robertson, an artist and photographer famed for her recording of Maya ruins, and she became Schele's mentor during the early stages of her career. In 1973, Robertson organized the first Mesa Redonda de Palenque, a small conference dedicated to Maya art and culture and, specifically, to deciphering the still-mysterious Maya hieroglyphics. Working with distinguished epigrapher Peter Mathews, Schele used her knowledge, vision, and a compilation of recent epigraphic breakthroughs to decipher a major section of the Palenque king list. This achievement was a stimulus that led to many later discoveries by Schele and others. In 1975-76, she was a fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., where she worked in collaboration with other scholars to make rapid progress in the decipherment of the Maya inscriptions. Papers presented at various conferences quickly brought her to the attention of the Maya profession. 
Linda Schele earned a Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin in 1980, with a dissertation entitled "Maya Glyphs: The Verbs." Not only a groundbreaking examination of hieroglyphs, her study was also a pioneering example of digital manuscript preparation. When Maya Glyphs: The Verbs was published in 1982 by the University of Texas Press, it won the "Most Creative and Innovative Project in Professional and Scholarly Publication" award, given by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. In 1981, Schele joined the faculty of the Department of Art and Art History at UT Austin as an associate professor, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in Mesoamerican art and hieroglyphics. She was promoted to full professor in 1987. In 1977, while still a graduate student, she organized the first Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at UT. As she would do annually for the next 22 years, Schele led her audience (averaging more than 500 people) through the intricacies of Maya inscriptions with her characteristic energy and verve. These meetings, which epitomized her belief in the importance of collaborative scholarship, have served as a major source for many of the significant epigraphic and iconographic discoveries made in the fields of Mesoamerican art and writing over the past two decades. In recent years, the original Hieroglyphic Workshop, held over spring break, expanded to become the Maya Meetings at Texas, which now also include a symposium of research papers by major scholars and the Forum on Hieroglyphic Writing. Scholars from Europe and the Americas--art historians, anthropologists, and linguists--participate in these interdisciplinary programs, making the Maya Meetings among the highest-profile annual scholarly gatherings in the field. In addition to the Maya Meetings at Texas, Linda Schele also organized the first and second D. J. Sibley Symposia, in 1991 and 1993, which brought together specialists in a variety of fields for scholarly roundtables on the "Symbolism of Kingship: Comparative Strategies Around the World" and "Cosmology and Natural Modeling Among the Aboriginal Peoples of the Americas." 
The most influential, as well as the most beautiful, of Linda Schele's publications is The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art, the catalogue for the 1986 exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Organized in collaboration with Mary Miller of Yale University, the exhibit brought together a unique assortment of Maya art from public and private collections. The catalogue, which continues to serve as a major text for the discipline, contained exceptional photographs and an authoritative and exhaustive analysis of the entire field of Maya art and epigraphy. The Blood of Kings was awarded the Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award of the College Art Association for the best exhibition catalogue of 1986 and established its authors as leaders in the field of Maya studies. From her first papers published in the 1970s, Schele went on to produce more than 25 essays in journals and books, more than 15 co-authored journal articles and book contributions, and more than 100 singly or co-authored notes and interim field reports in Copan Notes and the Texas Notes on Pre-Columbian Art, Writing, and Culture, which she edited. Her collaborators included Peter Mathews, Floyd Lounsbury, David Freidel, and Nikolai Grube, among others, along with the graduate students with whom she often co-authored papers. Schele believed deeply in the importance of sharing information and discoveries, as the creation of the Texas Notes series attests, and her substantial Workbooks for the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshops became another important vehicle for promulgating the latest discoveries in the field. Linda Schele was also dedicated to making the fruits of scholarly research accessible to the general public. During the 1990s, she published four major books on the Maya: A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya, co-authored with David Freidel (Morrow, 1990); Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path, co-authored with Freidel and Joy Parker (Morrow, 1993); Hidden Faces of the Maya (Rostros Occultos de los Mayas) (Alti, 1997), with photographer Jorge Perez de Lara; and The Code of Kings: The Sacred Landscape of Seven Maya Temples and Tombs, co-authored with Peter Mathews (Scribner, 1998). These books demonstrate the multifaceted knowledge of Maya culture and history that Schele had developed, as well as the fertile results of her collaborative approach to scholarship. She wrote of that process: "I cannot describe to you the sheer joy of working with colleagues who follow different approaches . . . disagreeing about many things, combining ideas and data, debating, playing together until a new kind of understanding emerges from the collaboration that would never come from any one of us alone." This quote also describes the approach Schele took with the many graduate students who flocked to The University of Texas at Austin to study with her. New students were quickly welcomed into the community around her and challenged to become contributing members of the group. In seminars in Austin during the academic year, and during summer fieldwork in Guatemala and Mexico, students learned to see and understand Maya art and culture from this unique scholar who combined the visual sensibilities of an artist with her supreme skill as a "glypher." Emphasizing the value of interdisciplinary study and her own model of collaborative work, she also consistently encouraged students to interact with colleagues in a variety of fields on campus and beyond. During her teaching career, Linda Schele chaired more than 40 dissertation and thesis committees in the Department of Art and Art History and in UT's Institute for Latin American Studies. She trained many of the current generation of scholars of Maya and Mesoamerican art, and those students now teach at colleges and universities across the country. It is little wonder that the 1997 edition of Lingua Franca's Real Guide to Graduate School named The University of Texas at Austin as the sole place to study Mesoamerican art. Determined to ensure the continuation of what she had begun, before her death Linda Schele and her husband generously established the financial groundwork for the Linda and David Schele Chair in Mesoamerican Art and Writing, for which fundraising now continues in UT's College of Fine Arts. 
During the 1980s, Schele's scholarly interests expanded to include the culture of the contemporary Maya. At the invitation of indigenous Maya academics in Guatemala, Schele and colleagues Nikolai Grube and Frederico Fahsen organized 13 Hieroglyphic Writing workshops in Guatemala and Mexico between 1988 and 1997. The goal of these workshops was the re-introduction of hieroglyphic writing and the stimulation of interest in ancient Maya history among the modern Maya. Schele spoke passionately of this work in her 1995 College Art Association Convocation address, explaining her conviction that "through these workshops . . . we are giving the Maya access to the tools they need to take back their history and turn it to their own use." 
She always considered this endeavor a partnership with her Maya colleagues in which she learned as much from them as they from her. On March 21, 1998, Linda Schele was awarded Diplomas of Recognition in honor of her work in Guatemala from both the Exterior Relations Ministry of the Guatemalan government and the Museo Popul Vuh and Universidad Francisco Marroquin. The deep affection and respect the presenters showed for Linda Schele was a moving testament to her importance for the people of Guatemala. Schele received hundreds of invitations to share her expertise with the public, ranging from the most prestigious scholarly conferences to more popular audiences and even local elementary schools. She also revealed her love and knowledge of Maya culture in several television interviews, including her profile on Bill Kurtis's New Explorers series on PBS. One month she might be testifying before a NASA blue ribbon panel on the subject of "Exploration of Neighboring Planetary Systems" and another she would be tramping around Maya sites, leading a group of tourists on her guided tour. As famous as she had become, Linda Schele always remained completely accessible and down-to-earth, full of infectious enthusiasm and humor, and savoring every moment. 
Linda Schele died of pancreatic cancer on April 18, 1998. She is survived by her husband, David; her brother, Tom Richmond; and the family of devoted students to whom she gave so generously in her career as a teacher. During her valiant battle with cancer, she told her students that their work was what kept her going. She managed to teach two seminars the very week in which she died, a reflection of her remarkable strength and inspiration. By Linda Dalrymple Henderson,
Commentary by Peter Mathews, Maya epigrapher, author, and Linda Schele's friend and collaborator:"Linda Schele and I first met in Palenque in 1973, at a time when we were both just beginning our careers in Maya studies. Our first publication together grew out of that first meeting, and of course Linda rapidly went on to be one of the dominating figures in the field of Maya hieroglyphic writing and history. Her influence on the field was both deep and broad, but I would identify three areas where she had a special impact. "The first was in her numerous publications. Quite simply, Linda Schele's publication record is prodigious. She published everything from major, state-of-the-art books to major journal articles to shorter 'notes' intended for quick dissemination to colleagues. Her first great book, Blood of Kings (co-authored with Mary Miller) was technically a museum exhibition catalogue, but it was so much more than that, for it contained lengthy chapters providing new insights on various aspects of ancient Maya life such as kingship, warfare, bloodletting, and so on. Not long afterwards Linda published (with David Freidel) A Forest of Kings, which described in great detail (archaeological and historical from the hieroglyphs) various key episodes of Maya history. In this book, I believe that the ancient Maya were brought back to life in a way that no other scholar had previously been able to do. A Forest of Kings didn't just report dryly on certain arcane details of Maya history, it brought the reader into ancient Maya royal courts and battlefields as a close observer of those momentous events and their aftermaths. "Linda's great talent for making Maya studies accessible to the general public also led to her second great contribution to the field. Starting in 1977, she offered public workshops at The University of Texas on how to read Maya hieroglyphs. Nearly 25 years later, the Maya Hieroglyphic Forum at Texas, as each of these workshops is now called, is still going strong. The University of Texas at Austin during spring break is in fact the Mecca of Maya studies, a time when the long-suffering professors in the Art Department prepare to be invaded by hundreds of 'glyphers', as Linda called us: people ranging from neophyte amateurs (for their first workshop, at least) to 'old hands' and distinguished professionals in the field. "The other workshops that were a special source of pride for Linda were the ones that she and her friends and colleagues offered to the Maya themselves in Guatemala and in Yucat?. These workshops are open only to Maya, and I remember after the first workshop--offered by her, Nicholas Hopkins, and Kathryn Josserand--how Linda glowed as she told me about a Palenque hieroglyphic text that was 'read' in more than half a dozen Mayan languages. Later Maya workshops were led by Linda, Nikolai Grube, and Federico Fahsen, and these two friends of Linda continue the tradition today. She was particularly proud that through these workshops the Maya were having an opportunity to regain their own history, something that had been denied them in 500 years of colonial rule and its aftermath. "The third great contribution that Linda Schele made to the field of Maya and Mesoamerican studies was her work with the students that she taught and trained and influenced. Some of the best dissertations in the history of the field were produced under her tutelage, and several of her students are now in their own right leaders of their field. They are Linda's living legacy. The openness in research and collaboration that she fostered were a major reason, I believe, for the rapid advance of the field of Maya hieroglyphic decipherment. Linda Schele was a true leader of this process, something that Michael Coe has called 'one of the great intellectual achievements of our century.'" |
||
 |
 |