For anyone who ever wanted to be an archaeologist, Ian Graham could be a
hero. This lively memoir chronicles Graham's career as the "last
explorer" and a fierce advocate for the protection and preservation of
Maya sites and monuments across Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. It is
also full of adventure and high society, for the self-deprecating Graham
traveled to remote lands such as Afghanistan in wonderful company. He
tells entertaining stories about his encounters with a host of notables,
beginning with Rudyard Kipling, a family friend from Graham's childhood.
Born in 1923 into an aristocratic family descended from Oliver Cromwell,
Ian Graham was educated at Winchester, Cambridge, and Trinity College,
Dublin. His career in Mesoamerican archaeology can be said to have begun
in 1959 when he turned south in his Rolls Royce and began traveling
through the Maya lowlands photographing ruins. He has worked as an
artist, cartographer, and photographer, and has mapped and documented
inscriptions at hundreds of Maya sites, persevering under rugged field
conditions.
Graham is best known as the founding director of the Corpus of Maya
Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Program at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology
and Ethnology, Harvard University. He was awarded a MacArthur Foundation
"genius grant" in 1981, and he remained the Maya Corpus program director
until his retirement in 2004.
Graham's careful recordings of Maya inscriptions are often credited with
making the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphics possible. But it is the
romance of his work and the graceful conversational style of his writing
that make this autobiography must reading, not just for Mayanists but
for anyone with a taste for the adventure of archaeology.
