LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Linda Schele
built 634 days ago
M[O]re than a quarter century ago, Linda Schele, observing that there was no settlement map of Palenque, set out with Alfonso Morales to begin the process with a comprehensive sketch map. Hers was the first published report on the settlement outside the monumental core area (L. Schele, 1981, Sacred Site and World View at Palenque. In Dumbarton Oaks Conference on Mesoamerican Sites and World Views, edited by Elizabeth P. Benson, pp. 87117. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.).
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David Friedel and Linda Schele are the authors of A Forest of Kings (Quill, 1991). David Friedel has been a Maya archaeologist for more than twenty years and is a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. A well-known authority on Maya writing and art, Linda Schele is the John D. Murchinson Regents Professor in Art at the University of Texas in Austin. Joy Parker has taught writing workshops at Columbia University and New York University. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
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Years ago, when Linda Schele and Peter Mathews were beginning to work with Maya hieroglyphs, they dreamed of a project like this. Of course personal computers were not in use at that time, and such things as web pages were not even a gleam in someone's eye-pod. But Linda and Peter talked about how wonderful it would be, some day, to have a glyph catalogue that would give readings for individual signs, and their contexts in a variety of word or phrase examples. They hoped that one day it would be possible to convert Thompson's catalogue of numbers and signs (which in the 1970s was used as the standard reference for Maya signs) to a living dictionary, where the words of the ancient Maya could speak out from their beautiful visual signs. Admittedly there were times when Linda and Peter wondered if it would ever be possible to accomplish this; at times the glyphs seemed so obtuse and recalcitrant. However the fast pace of decipherment of Maya hieroglyphs over the past 25 years has made such a dictionary possible.
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For the concept "birth of" Linda Schele translated a visual which she discovered as a [M]odismo "to touch the earth." The glyph she discovered on the Alfardas at the Temple of the Sun in Palenque was a "hand" touching the glyph "caban," (the earth). It was a concept that easily lent itself to glyphic representation. It expressed the same concept as another, now familiar glyph, identified as an upended "frog." The "frog" glyph ("to be born") is a more concise variant (one-form) than the hand, earth glyph (two forms).
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Linda Schele discovered that the World Tree is a literal depiction of the heavens as well as an abstract symbol. Her investigations, vividly recounted in Maya Cosmos, led her to the conclusion that the Milky Way is the World Tree. The Maya long count was initiated on or about August 13 in 3114 BC, the date of Creation. At dawn in mid-August, the Milky Way stands erect, running through the zenith from north to south. It becomes the axis of the heavens, the raised up sky.
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Linda Schele was a world-renowned scholar of Maya art and writing, and when she died of cancer in 1998, she was at the forefront of the decoding of Maya hieroglyphics. Her contributions to the evolution of that field in the last three decades of the 20th century were vitally important.
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Linda Schele