William Robertson Coe II (28 November 1926 – 23 November 2009) was an American academic,

archaeologist Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...

, and

Mayanist A Mayanist ( es, mayista) is a scholar specialising in research and study of the Mesoamerican pre-Columbian Maya civilisation. This discipline should not be confused with Mayanism, a collection of New Age beliefs about the ancient Maya. Mayan ...

scholar, renowned for his extensive

field work Field research, field studies, or fieldwork is the collection of raw data outside a laboratory, library, or workplace setting. The approaches and methods used in field research vary across disciplines. For example, biologists who conduct f ...

and publications on

pre-Columbian In the history of the Americas, the pre-Columbian era spans from the original settlement of North and South America in the Upper Paleolithic period through European colonization, which began with Christopher Columbus's voyage of 1492. Usually, th ...

Maya civilization The Maya civilization () of the Mesoamerican people is known by its ancient temples and glyphs. Its Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. It is also noted for its art, archit ...

sites. He is best known for his decades of work and investigations at

Tikal Tikal () (''Tik’al'' in modern Mayan orthography) is the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in a rainforest in Guatemala. It is one of the largest archeological sites and urban centers of the pre-Co ...

, the major site in the

Petén Basin The Petén Basin is a geographical subregion of Mesoamerica, primarily located in northern Guatemala within the Department of El Petén, and into Campeche state in southeastern Mexico. During the Late Preclassic and Classic periods of pre-Colum ...

region of modern-day

Guatemala Guatemala ( ; ), officially the Republic of Guatemala ( es, República de Guatemala, links=no), is a country in Central America. It is bordered to the north and west by Mexico; to the northeast by Belize and the Caribbean; to the east by H ...

and one of the largest and most dominant Maya sites of the

Classic period Mesoamerican chronology divides the history of prehispanic Mesoamerica into several periods: the Paleo-Indian (first human habitation until 3500 BCE); the Archaic (before 2600 BCE), the Preclassic or Formative (2500 BCE –&nbs ...

. Coe led the excavation and investigation project at Tikal during the 1960s, and was responsible for coordinating much of the site's restoration work and compiling the voluminous documentation of the field seasons reports. His academic career was spent in association with the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

, where he studied and later taught as professor in anthropology, and its Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology where he curated the museum's American collection. Coe was the son of designer Clover Simonton and banker William Rogers Coe. He was the brother of fellow Mayanist

Michael D. Coe Michael Douglas Coe (May 14, 1929 – September 25, 2019) was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, epigrapher, and author. He is known for his research on pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, particularly the Maya, and was among the foremost Mayan ...

, with whom he had a falling-out in the early 1960s. The two rarely spoke of each other afterward. Michael once left him in a deep excavation trench in Belize, where William examined some

potsherds This page is a glossary of archaeology, the study of the human past from material remains. A B C D E F ...

and wondered why they had been placed so deliberately, leading to his long fascination with context and formation processes.

References

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Coe, William R. American Mesoamericanists 20th-century Mesoamericanists Mesoamerican archaeologists Mayanists University of Pennsylvania alumni University of Pennsylvania faculty 1926 births 2009 deaths Scientists from New York City 20th-century American archaeologists Historians from New York (state)