Michael Coe, influential archaeologist and Maya scholar, dies at 90

Michael Coe, an archaeologist and anthropologist who shined a light on ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, leading excavations in Guatemala and Mexico, helping decode Maya writing and art, and writing best-selling books that galvanized public interest in his field, died Sept. 25 at a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. He was 90.

He suffered a stroke, said his son Andrew Coe, a writer and food historian.

Driven by a sense of adventure, Coe worked as a CIA officer in Taiwan before beginning his archaeological career in Guatemala in the mid-1950s, excavating a site on the Pacific Ocean that was previously ignored – in part because of the sweltering heat and mosquitoes. He returned to the United States one Christmas and spent most of the holiday in bed, recovering from malaria.

Later, digging in the dirt of San Lorenzo, near the Gulf of Mexico in Veracruz, Coe unearthed colossal stone heads and monuments left behind by the Olmec, a civilization he helped date, tracing its roots back more than 3,000 years. He also deciphered the meaning of cryptic Maya ceramics and writing symbols, or glyphs, and drew attention to a bark-paper document known as the Grolier Codex, generally considered one of four surviving Maya manuscripts, or codices.

“Mike was one of the greatest archaeologists of the 20th century and a peerless popularizer of our field,” said Stephen Houston, a fellow Maya scholar and chairman of the Brown University anthropology department.

In works such as “Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs” (1962), “The Maya” (1966) and “Breaking the Maya Code” (1992), Houston said, Coe “combined a fluency of expression with real learning and real accomplishment as a first-rank scholar on his own.”