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On April 18, 1998, Linda Schele, one of the century's greatest Mayanists, died of pancreatic cancer in Austin, Texas. At her death, she was John D. Murchison Regents Professor of Art at the University of Texas.
Her brilliant career in Maya studies could never have been predicted from her childhood and upbringing. She was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to a family that she once described to me, probably with some exaggeration, as "essentially redneck." Linda had always wanted to be an artist, but she had to make a living, so in 1960 she began taking commercial art courses at the University of Cincinnati, graduating in 1964. Her horizons were broadening to include literature, and after another four years in Cincinnati's graduate program, she was awarded a master's degree in that subject. In the same year, 1968, she married the architect David Schele, beginning a partnership that was to last the rest of her life. The young couple moved to Mobile, Alabama, where Linda began teaching art at the University of South Alabama, a position that she held until 1980, all the while continuing to paint.
The year 1970 marked a crucial point in Linda's life trajectory, for she and David had decided to spend Christmas vacation travelling through Mexico. Their journey, accompanied by five Alabama students, took them to the Maya ruins of Palenque, about which they knew next to nothing. "Palenque hit me in the gut," she once said, and she returned the next summer to study and draw the architecture. Another milestone year for Linda was 1973. That summer she worked as Merle Greene Robertson's assistant in photographing the stucco reliefs of Palenque and the great burial chamber of its ruler K'inich Hanab Pakal. Then, in December 1973, during the epoch-making First Palenque Mesa Redonda, she not only gave her first professional paper, but also collaborated with the young Australian scholar Peter Mathews to present to the conference members, for the very first time, the virtually complete dynastic history of a great Maya city. This meeting established the previously unknown Linda as a major figure in Maya studies, with an impressive command not only of art and art history, but also of dirt archaeology and epigraphy.
This was also a turning point for...