Final Report
An Archaeologist Excavates His Past
Michael D. Coe
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Here is a man of brilliance, humour and charm, who has lived his life as an ebullient adventure.
For more than four decades, Michael Coe has been at the forefront of American archaeology. His research on the Olmecs and the Maya has had a decisive effect on the way we think about Mesoamerican culture, and his acclaimed books, such as The Maya and Breaking the Maya Code, have introduced archaeology to a popular audience.
Beginning in 1955, when he entered the Graduate School of Harvard University, he committed himself to the civilizations of ancient America. Maya studies in the 1950s were dominated by a number of strong characters, many of whose ideas were wrong. Coe worked on the front line of a generation of archaeological discovery, research and interpretation that has profoundly altered and enhanced our vision of ancient Mesoamerica.
His quest to penetrate archaeological puzzles and mysteries has led him on some extraordinary adventures: working against the clock on soon-to-be drowned Indian sites in Tennessee; digging in remote Guatemala in gruelling conditions; investigating the previously little-known Olmec culture on Mexico’s Gulf Coast; taking part in the ground-breaking decipherment of the ancient Maya script.
Coe has always had passionate enthusiasm for other aspects of his life – for his remarkable wife, the anthropologist Sophie D. Coe, their five children, and the dilapidated Massachusetts farmhouse that they restored; for art collecting; for fly fishing (an obsession that has taken him from the tropics to Siberia); and for travel – to Russia under Brezhnev, to Angkor Wat after the Khmer Rouge.
Michael D. Coe is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Curator Emeritus in the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University. He received his Ph.D from Harvard University and has served as advisor at the Center for Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and received the Tatiana Proskouriakoff Award from Harvard University for distinction in Mesoamerican research. In 2004 the Guatemalan government awarded him its highest honour, the Order of the Quetzal, for his many publications on the Maya. His numerous books include The Maya, Mexico, Angkor and the Khmer Civilization, The True History of Chocolate (with Sophie D. Coe), Reading the Maya Glyphs (with Mark Van Stone), and Breaking the Maya Code (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award).
Also by Michael D. Coe:
The Maya
Angkor and the Khmer Civilization
The True History of Chocolate with Sophie D. Coe
Reading the Maya Glyphs
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|  |  | | | | ISBN 0500051437 | | ISBN-13 978-0500051436 | | | | 23.2 x 15.5 cm | | Hardback | | 224pp | | 41 illustrations | | First published 2006 | | | | £18.95 | | | |  | | | | 
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