William Robertson Coe II
William Robertson Coe II 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 banker William Rogers Coe and designer Clover Simonton. 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. 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.
