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IN MEMORIAM
LINDA SCHELE
Linda Schele, a world-renowned scholar of Maya
art and writing who taught in the Department of Art and Art History
for eighteen years, died of pancreatic cancer on April 18, 1998.
Linda was at the forefront of the decoding of Maya hieroglyphics,
and her contributions to the evolution of that field in the last
two decades 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, where she had 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, Linda 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 that year began a teaching
career at the University of South Alabama at Mobile. Between
1968 and 1980 she taught studio art, rising to the rank of Professor.
In 1970 Linda's career took a sudden turn in a
new direction, when she and David made a trip to photograph the
Maya ruins in Yucatan. 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, Linda met Merle Greene
Robertson, an artist and photographer famed for her recording
of Maya ruins, who became her 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.
Participating in that conference, and working with Peter Mathews,
Linda used her knowledge, vision, and a compilation of recent
epigraphic breakthroughs to decipher a major section of the Palenque
king list, providing the first detailed demonstration that the
glyphs were historic in nature. This achievement was a stimulus
that led to many later discoveries by Linda 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 earned her 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 ground-breaking
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, Linda joined the faculty of the Department of Art and
Art History at the University of Texas at 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, Linda
organized the first Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop at the University
of Texas at Austin. As she would do annually for the next twenty-two
years, Linda led her audience (averaging over 500 people) through
the intricacies of Maya inscriptions with her characteristic
energy and verve. These meetings, which epitomized Linda's belief
in the importance of collaborative scholarship, have been a major
source for many of the significant epigraphic and iconographic
discoveries made in the fields of Mesoamerican art and writing
over the last 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, both
held in the four days before the six-day Long Workshop begins.
Scholars from Europe and the Americas--art historians, anthropologists,
and linguists--attend and participate in these interdisciplinary
programs, making the Maya Meetings one of the highest-profile
annual scholarly gatherings held at the University of Texas at
Austin. In addition to the Maya Meetings, Linda 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's publications is the catalogue for the 1986 exhibition
at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, The Blood of Kings:
Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. 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
field, contained exceptional photographs and an authoritative
and exhaustive analysis of the whole 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,
Linda went on to produce over 25 singly authored essays in journals
or books, over 15 co-authored journal articles or book contributions,
and over 100 singly or co-authored notes and interim field reports
in Copan Notes and the Texas Notes on Precolumbian
Art, Writing, and Culture, which she edited at Texas. 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. Linda 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 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 for the
trade press: A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient
Maya, co-authored with David Freidel (1990); Maya Cosmos:
Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path, co-authored with
Freidel and Joy Parker (1993); Hidden Faces of the Maya (Rostros
Occultos de los Mayas) (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
(1998). These books demonstrate the multifaceted knowledge of
Maya culture and history Linda 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 Linda took
with the many graduate students who flocked to the University
of Texas at Austin in order to study with her. New students were
quickly welcomed into the community of students around Linda
and challenged to become contributing members of the group. In
seminars in Austin during the academic year and during summer
field work 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 both on campus and beyond. During her teaching career
Linda chaired over forty dissertation and thesis committees in
the Department of Art and Art History and in the 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 insure the continuation of what she had begun, before her
death Linda and her husband generously established the financial
groundwork for the Linda and David Schele Chair in Mesoamerican
Art and Writing, for which fund raising now continues in the
College of Fine Arts.
During the 1980s Linda's scholarly interests had
expanded to include the culture of the contemporary Maya. At
the invitation of indigenous Maya academics in Guatemala, Linda,
along with such colleagues as Nikolai Grube and Frederico Fahsen,
organized thirteen 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. Linda
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 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 of the presenters for Linda was a
moving testament to her importance for the people of Guatemala.
Linda gave a compelling account of this work in
her invited lecture before the College Art Association in 1995.
This invitation was but one of the hundreds she received, ranging
from the most prestigious scholarly locales and entities to more
popular audiences and even local elementary schools. She also
shared her love and knowledge of Maya culture in several television
interviews, including, most notably, her profile on Bill Kurtis's New
Explorers series on PBS. One month Linda 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 with a group of tourists on a tour
she was guiding. As famous as she had become, Linda always remained
Linda--completely accessible and down-to-earth, full of infectious
enthusiasm and humor, and savoring every moment. She was also
a computer whiz, always far ahead of her colleagues, and a nocturnal
being, so that she and David were indeed among the "wizards
who stay up late," as the pioneers of the Internet have
been called.
Linda is survived by her husband David, her brother
Tom Richmond, and the family of devoted students to whom she
gave so generously during her career as a teacher. She fought
a valiant battle with cancer, and, telling her students that
their work was what was keeping her going, she managed to teach
two seminars the very week in which she died. That triumph was
a reflection of the strength of this remarkable woman, who taught
all those around her crucial lessons about living and about dying.
She was an inspiration to all those who knew her, and we, her
colleagues, are particularly grateful to have been a part of
her world.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner, President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared by a Special
Committee consisting of Professors Linda Dalrymple Henderson
(Chair), Terence Grieder, and John R. Clarke. .
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