Linda Schele

Linda Schele (October 30, 1942 – April 18, 1998) was an American Mesoamerican archaeologist who was an expert in the field of Maya epigraphy and iconography. She played a central role in the decoding of much of the Maya script. She produced a massive volume of drawings of stelae and inscriptions, which, following her wishes, are free for use to scholars^[which?]. In 1978, she founded the annual Maya Meetings at the University of Texas at Austin.

She was from Hendersonville, Tennessee, a northern suburb of Nashville. Her mother, Ruby Richmond, was active in historic preservation at Historic Rock Castle in the 1980s.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Linda Schele began taking commercial art courses at the University of Cincinnati in 1960 and graduated in Education and Art in 1964. With an increasing interest in literature, she spent another four years in Cincinnati's graduate program and obtained her master's degree in Art in 1968. She married the architect David Schele in 1968, and started teaching Studio Art at the University of South Alabama, remaining there till 1980, by which time she was Professor.

In 1970 she traveled with her husband, David Schele, to photograph Mesoamerican monuments in Yucatán on behalf of the University. An obligatory visit to Palenque the next summer turned into a 12-day stay spent drawing and studying Maya architecture. Fascinated by the art, Schele decided to investigate the culture and history of the ancient people who had created the city.

Mentored by Merle Greene Robertson, Schele worked with Peter Mathews and Floyd Loundsbury to decipher a major section of the list of Palenque kings, presenting her work in the 1973 conference Mesa Redonda de Palenque, organized by Robertson. This meeting established the previously unknown Linda as a major figure in the Maya studies, not only of art and history, but also of dirt archaeology and epigraphy, and her work stimulated several later discoveries, by herself and others. In 1975, Schele was invited to the Second International Archaeoastronomy Conference at Colgate to present an exploratory paper on Palenque hierophanies and their link to emblem and skull variant glyphs, which she later published in 1977.

A strong supporter of collaborative scholarship, Schele became a Fellow in pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., in 1975. Alongside Peter Mathews; David Kelley; and one of her longtime mentors, Floyd Lounsbury, she participated in a series of miniconferences at Dumbarton Oaks which pushed further developing and refining of the Palenque series and also opened new epigraphic frontiers. She focused on the study of word ordering in Maya inscriptions for the next two years there.

Still attending graduate school, Schele founded the Maya Hieroglyphic Workshop in Texas in 1977 which consisted of 21 consecutive seminars concerning Maya hieroglyphic writing and introduced more people intrigued by the Maya field than many other books from that time that were considered "popular". Twenty years later, the workshop expanded into what is known as the Maya Meetings at Texas, and includes a symposium of research papers by major scholars and the Forum on Hieroglyphic Writing.

By this time in her life, Schele realized her destiny as a Mayanist; she enrolled as a graduate student in Latin American Studies at the University of Texas shortly before resigning from her position at South Alabama. She was awarded a Doctorate in Latin American studies by the University of Texas in 1980. She continued her teaching career there, in the department of Art/Art History. At the time of her death, she was the John D. Murchison Regents Professor of Art in the department.