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MICHAEL D. COE (1929–2019): A LIFE IN THE PAST

Michael D. Coe lived a remarkable life, born into privilege but always a “man of the people.” Committed to novel and transformative scholarship, he shared knowledge with students and the public, explored new methods of archaeological analysis, and brought acute insight to past works of skill, meaning, and beauty. When Mike died on September 25, 2019, he was halfway through his 5th k’atun, the consecutive Maya tabulation of 20-year spans. For over 70 years he had played a key role in the archaeological study of Mesoamerica. Harvard-trained in both his B.A. and Ph.D.—the latter with Gordon Willey, whose seminars he appreciated—Mike would have been the first to acknowledge that his allegiance was to Yale, where he spent all but a few years of his professional career. “Yale left me alone,” he would say with gratitude. There, he also trained a large and notably varied group of specialists in the ancient New World. The interests of his students, graduate and undergraduate alike, matched his own breadth. Mike’s legacy, which we describe here, will continue to ripple outward, as left by a person who mattered deeply to the field and to the friends and protégés that mourn his passing. Our intellectual overview begins with a glimpse at how Mike’s personality inflected his thinking and writing, touches on his vision of deep civilization and the long-term, describes his epigraphic and iconographic discoveries, reflects on his passion for museums and thoughtful display, and comes back, as a life of consequence must, to the person who so enriched others (Figure 1).