Michael D. Coe


Michael Douglas Coe was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, epigrapher and author. He is known for his research on pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, particularly the Maya, and was among the foremost Mayanists of the late 20th century. He specialised in comparative studies of ancient tropical forest civilizations, such as those of Central America and Southeast Asia. He held the chair of Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Yale University, and was Curator Emeritus of the Anthropology collection in the Peabody Museum of Natural History, where he had been Curator from 1968 to 1994.
Coe authored a number of popular works for the non-specialist audience, several of which were best-selling and much reprinted, such as The Maya and Breaking the Maya Code. He also co-authored the book Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs with Rex Koontz.

Early life and education

Coe was the son of banker William Rogers Coe and designer Clover Simonton. He attended Fay School in Southborough, Massachusetts and St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire. He graduated from Harvard College in 1950 and received his PhD in anthropology from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in 1959. Shortly after commencing his graduate studies program there, in 1955 he married the daughter of the noted evolutionary biologist and Russian émigré Theodosius Dobzhansky, Sophie, who was then an undergraduate anthropology student at Radcliffe College. Sophie translated from Russian, the work of epigrapher, Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov, The Writing of the Maya Indians. Knorosov based his studies on De Landa's phonetic alphabet and is credited with originally breaking the Maya code. Coe's brother, William Robertson Coe II, was also a Mayanist; the two had a falling-out in the 1960s and rarely spoke of each other.
During the Korean War, Coe worked as a CIA case officer and as a part of a front organization, Western Enterprises, in Taiwan, as part of efforts to counter the influence of Mao's China.

Career

Coe's graduate advisor was Gordon Willey. In his Harvard dissertation at La Victoria, Guatemala, he established the first secure chronology of ceramics for southern Mesoamerica. With Richard Diehl at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, he used new magnetometry techniques to locate and salvage most of the Olmec colossal heads now known, such that he is now considered one of the discoverers of the Olmec.
Coe and his students have contributed greatly to the decipherment of Maya writing. He championed Yuri Knorosov and the phonetic approach to decipherment, against the public rebukes of J. E. S. Thompson. At Yale he taught the Mayanists Peter Mathews, Karl Taube, and Stephen D. Houston, the latter of whom collaborated with David Stuart. He sometimes collaborated with his Yale colleague, anthropological linguist Floyd Lounsbury. Coe also advised the authors of The Blood of Kings, a work about Classic Maya rulership: Mary Ellen Miller, at Yale, and Linda Schele, at the University of Texas at Austin. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code, which describes these breakthroughs, was nominated for a National Book Award.
Coe was the first to date El Baúl Stela 1 correctly ; this sculpture from the Southern Maya Area is one of three known with Cycle 7 Long Count dated monuments, predating all Lowland Long-Count dated sculptures. With Kent V. Flannery, he was the first to observe that the greatest southern area site, Kaminaljuyu, probably profited greatly from its proximity to and exploitation of the enormous El Chayal obsidian fields. Coe discovered the Primary Standard Sequence, a sequence of hieroglyphs appearing around the rim of many Classic Maya ceramic vessels. Coe organized an exhibit of some of those ceramics at the Grolier Club in New York, where he also publicized, for the first time, a newly-discovered Maya codex — the first found in the Americas, and only the fourth known to exist. Some of Coe's other insights came in casual comments to his students or in short reports, including that the Popol Vuh was but a fragment of a great lost pan-Maya mythology, and that Classic Maya rulers were shamanic figures as well as administrators.
Aside from his work on the Maya, his short paper "The Churches on the Green," published during the height of processual archaeology, imagined how that approach would fail to discern the origins and purpose of three churches on the New Haven Green if they were studied five thousand years later. His book on the Angkor civilization of ancient Cambodia, Angkor and the Khmer Civilization, was described by David P. Chandler as "the most thoroughgoing, accessible and persuasive synthesis of precolonial Cambodian history, society and culture that I had ever read."

Debates

Coe added qualified support to the "Cultura Madre" view of the Olmec as the "mother culture of Mesoamerican civilization"; another issue, use of information obtainable from looted Maya ceramics, brought criticism. Some of Coe's work came under scrutiny by two scholars of Pre-Columbian art. His work on, for example, the Cascajal Block and on the Wrestler, was called into question. Other scholars disputed these claims and found them inadequately supported by evidence. The Cascajal block in particular was argued to have many features fully consistent with Olmec imagery, and the same was said for the Wrestler. Nevertheless, such criticisms were based on what other scholars considered poorly or undefined notions of Olmec iconography and of rulership.

Awards and recognition