The Living Maya and the Late Linda Schele

This article on my former professor Linda Schele was in the Austin Chronicle yesterday. I still miss her.

Austin becomes a hotbed of past and future Maya knowledge
BY ROB D'AMICO

Linda Schele was always quite a show.

A towering figure, both physically and intellectually, she strode across the stages and workshop rooms at the annual University of Texas Maya Meetings, often peppering her language with curses and enthusiastic exclamations at moments of discovery. She liked the attention she commanded, and it fed her enjoyment in being at the forefront of research on the ancient Maya. And unlike many of her counterparts in academia, who zealously defend their findings from competing scholars, Schele encouraged lively discussion and revision of her theories, not only among the elite ranks of archaeologists, epigraphers, and art historians of Harvard, Yale, and the like, but also among those with no formal training. "She had a guru quality about her, and people would come from all over the world to Austin to hear her pronouncements," said David Stuart, a longtime Schele friend and protégé who now heads the UT-Austin Mesoamerica Center.

Schele died in 1998, of pancreatic cancer, at the age of 55. Her continuing intellectual and cultural legacy, in terms of her contributions to the reading and interpretation of Maya hieroglyphs, remains enormous. She also put UT-Austin on the map as a leading center for Mesoamerican research. Today, UT researchers continue to be at the center of groundbreaking discoveries in the world of Maya archaeology. But they also are leading a movement to bring the world of the ancient Maya into the lives of the living Maya and are engaging in new debates over archaeological discoveries of ecological destruction and its relevance to our planet today.

Read much more here about the Mesoamerica program at the University of Texas.