Linda Schele Papers

Linda Schele was born in Nashville, Tennessee on October 30, 1942, daughter to Ruby Richmond and sister to Tom Richmond. Her father-in-law was DeWayne Schele, and she had a sister-in-law Sandra Jane Quance. In 1964 Schele graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a bachelor’s degree in education. She would continue her education at Cincinnati, graduating in 1968 with a master’s degree in fine arts. That same year, Schele married David Schele, architect and fellow Cincinnati graduate, and started teaching studio art courses at the University of South Alabama in Mobile.

In 1970, Linda and David Schele would travel to the Mayan city of Palenque in the Yucatan Peninsula. During the course of the trip, Linda Schele developed a strong enthusiasm for Mayan art which would quickly translate into a new career focus on studying Mayan culture and history. Schele would soon after enroll at the University of Texas, earning her doctorate in Latin American studies in 1980 and subsequently becoming a professor in the Department of Art and Art History in 1981. Her dissertation entitled Maya Glyphs: the Verbs was published in 1982.

Schele was labeled widely as a pioneer in the field of Mayan studies, most of all for her work decoding and translating Mayan inscriptions, which in the 1970s, upended modern understanding of Mayan history and culture. Noted for her 1973 collaborative work with Peter Matthews and Floyd Lounsbury, the three studied the glyphs of Palenque, revealing hundreds of years of Mayan history.

In 1977, Schele and Nancy Troike would co-found the Maya Meetings (presently known as the Mesoamerica Meetings), an annual University of Texas conference centered on Maya archaeological research and discovery.

In 1986, Schele and Mary Miller would curate for The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the exhibition and catalog of Maya art, The Blood of Kings: A New Interpretation of Maya Art. A landmark contribution, the works described the Mayan histories of warfare and ritual sacrifice, which stood in stark contrast with prior interpretations of the Mayans as a primarily peaceful people.

In 1988, Schele would collaborate with Nikolai Grube and Frederico Fahsen on a series of hieroglyphic workshops in both Mexico and Guatemala. Created specifically for modern day Mayan descendants, the workshops were intended to provide skills needed to decipher and understand the written language of their ancestors.

Linda Schele passed away on April 18, 1998, in a hospital near her home in Austin, Texas due to pancreatic cancer. Anticipating her death, Schele would continue to lecture, and established The Linda Schele Endowment in Maya and Pre Columbian Studies at UT Austin.