Ancient knowledge

Ian Graham is still digging, drawing, and deciphering after all these years

It is 11 a.m. on a sticky tropical Saturday and Ian Graham is lying on his side in the dried grass before a 1,300-year-old stone building in the Maya city of Yaxchilan in Chiapas, Mexico. Propped on one elbow, Graham is digging at the earth with a stick, scraping the dirt from around a stone.

He scrapes for a few moments, dribbles some water from his water bottle to loosen the hard earth, and then scrapes some more.

Nearby, five other archaeologists from the Peabody Museum's expedition to Yaxchilan work on another hole, digging, pulling out stones, looking for the pieces of a stela that Graham buried when he was here in the 1980s. Graham had photographed the carved rectangular stone and then buried it to keep it safe from looters and from rain, heat, and humidity.

It is no surprise that the archaeologists from six nations making up the Peabody's team are following Graham's footsteps -- and need his help to do it.

Ian Graham has spent a career in these parts. After more than 40 years in the field, his hundreds of drawings of Maya monuments, carvings, and inscriptions have not only provided a precise record of their existence, they have also provided the badly needed raw material for scholars trying to decipher the hieroglyphics they contain.

"Ian set the standard for the recording of Maya hieroglyphs," said Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology director William Fash. "There really is no other way to put it. He is the walking gold standard of the recording of Maya inscriptions."

Graham, 83, was the founding director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology's Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphics Inscriptions Program. Begun in 1968, the program was created by an international collection of scholars who agreed that more examples of Maya writing were needed to help with the decipherment process. The program is dedicated to recording and publishing every available inscription from the Maya cities that dot southern Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize. Despite Graham's prodigious body of work, much remains to be done, and in 2005, Graham handed the reins of the Corpus Program -- the world's largest archive of Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions -- to his successor, Barbara Fash.

"Ian began the work to record the monuments at this site for the Corpus in the 1970s," she said. "In days gone by, he was out here working with one or two men; there were fewer people visiting the site." Fash said she wanted to visit Yaxchilan with Graham to pick his brain about where different monuments might be located. He sometimes hid them to save them from looters, intending to return and retrieve them. On the expedition's second day, Fash and Graham uncovered the site's Stela 4, which had been lightly covered in the grand plaza.

Graham accompanied the Corpus Program's expedition to test three-dimensional digital scanning technology. It is hoped the technology will pick up where Graham left off and create precise, three-dimensional records of Maya monuments and inscriptions that will not only make them more accessible to scholars but also will preserve their information for future generations.

Preservation is critical because the monuments are fading. Even those protected from vandals and looters are still at the mercy of the humid tropical climate, whose intense heat and fierce rain take their toll. A small squiggle or telltale dot can make a difference in the meaning of a glyph, and it's those details that are being lost.

Before Graham began his work, deciphering the ancient Maya's written language had progressed slowly. Scholars trying to understand Maya glyphs were handicapped by a lack of material that provided different contexts, which are essential clues to a glyph's meaning.

Graham first set foot in Yaxchilan when he was in his early 30s, after a three-day paddle downriver. He found a city overgrown by the surrounding jungle, he said. Though he was interested in the inscriptions, he hadn't yet begun the sketching that would become his life's work.

"I'd heard all about Yaxchilan and seen the pictures," Graham said. "Paddling a canoe downriver to Yaxchilan is pretty hard, but paddling it back is another matter altogether."

Graham had become interested in the Maya a year or two earlier. He came to the United States from Britain after buying a vintage 1927 convertible Rolls Royce, hoping to bring it to sunny Los Angeles and sell it for a profit.

He shipped the car to New York and began his cross-country drive. It was while filling up at a Texas gas station that he saw the sign that would change his life: "Last Gas Before Mexico."

"I said, 'Hmmm, Mexico, that's an idea,'" Graham said. Then he headed south.

He first saw Maya writing when he visited a small museum in Mexico City. A stone tablet hung on the wall with curious squiggles on it. Someone at the museum told him the squiggles were writing whose meaning was unknown.

That piqued his curiosity, and after resuming his trip to Los Angeles and selling the Rolls, he repeatedly returned to Mexico and the Maya's Central American homelands. He learned about the Maya's flourishing civilization -- abandoned in the late 800s and early 900s A.D., their towering stone buildings, and their detailed carvings.

"It seemed one of the great gaps in world history," he said of his attraction to the Maya. "It was a young person's challenge that sounded very exciting -- travel, strange animals -- it all sort of fitted together. I'd always hated the idea of a 9-to-5 job, so I got an 8-to-10 one."

Graham began drawing the images and inscriptions he found. In the 1960s, Tulane University published his drawings for the first time, the work of four or five seasons.

By the late 1960s, Graham had developed a reputation for precise, beautiful drawings. When the Corpus Program was created in 1968, Graham seemed the perfect choice as its director. After more than four decades in the field, Graham is still an independent soul. He is something of a maverick, going where he wants when he wants. Tall and thin, he moves quickly and with purpose, his wiry frame topped with a head of short-cropped hair, often askew.

He considers himself blessed with good luck -- including the MacArthur Fellowship that he won as one of the inaugural class of "genius grant" recipients in 1981. He is so well-known in southern Mexico that he was greeted repeatedly during the expedition, and people in the know whisper, "That's Ian Graham." His name alone convinced a skeptical security guard to let a dozen members of the Peabody's team into Yaxchilan when they arrived late on the first afternoon of the six-day expedition.

Determined and passionate about his work, Graham is also ready with a smile, a joke, or a selection from his enormous stock of stories about his travels. Graham's quick wit and sharp mind are readily apparent, and his graciousness quickly wins him new fans.

"Everybody knows him as a real gentleman," said Barbara Fash, who shared an office with Graham for 10 years before taking over as Corpus Program director.

Maria Teresa Uriarte, a dean at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, had heard of Graham for years but met him for the first time during the Peabody's Yaxchilan trip.

"He's very well appreciated by Mexican archaeologists, especially for his work at Yaxchilan," Uriarte said. "We are very privileged to meet him and see how he expresses his love for this place." Uriarte said Graham continues to teach and not only through his work, providing an important example for the young scholars in the group.

"You ask yourself, Will you walk the way he walks? Will you be as straight as he is?" Uriarte said. "When you get older, you only get more so what you are. It shows he's always been a gentleman."