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.