William Robertson Coe II

William Robertson Coe II (28 November 1926 – 23 November 2009) was an American academic, archaeologist, and Mayanist scholar, renowned for his extensive field work and publications on pre-Columbian Maya civilization sites. He is best known for his decades of work and investigations at Tikal, the major site in the Petén Basin region of modern-day Guatemala and one of the largest and most dominant Maya sites of the Classic period.

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

References

• Times Online (23 January 2010). "[Obituaries:] William Robertson Coe: archaeologist" (online edition). The Times. London: Times Newspapers Ltd. Retrieved 28 January 2010.
• University of Pennsylvania (12 January 2010). "[Deaths:] Dr. Coe, Penn Museum" (online edition). The Almanac. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved 27 January 2010.