In his book Breaking the Maya Code, scholar Michael D. Coe wrote that deciphering the ancient Maya inscriptions was "one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of our age, on a par with the exploration of space and the discovery of the genetic code."

A major player in Breaking the Maya Code was the charismatic Linda Schele, who made groundbreaking contributions to Maya studies in the last three decades of the 20th century. Atlantic Monthly called her one of the world's best epigraphers. Her meticulous study of Maya hieroglyphics led to revelations about kingship, royal court life, warfare, bloodletting, and historical chronology. As a professor at The University of Texas at Austin for 18 years, she trained a new generation of leaders in Maya scholarship, she lectured widely and taught scores of lay audiences how to read "glyphs," and she conducted workshops in history and hieroglyphic writing for modern-day Maya living in Guatemala and the Yucat?.

Through her pioneering scholarship, personal magnetism, and passion for public discourse, Linda Schele transformed UT Austin into an international center for Maya studies. In 1997, the academic review Lingua Franca named UT as the leading university in which to study Mesoamerican art.

Although Linda Schele died of cancer in 1998, her legacy lives on in her many publications and in the nucleus of Maya-related activities she generated in Austin.

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