Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K'iche' Guatemalan human rights activist, feminist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting Indigenous rights internationally.
The Maya are an ethnolinguistic group of indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica. The ancient Maya civilization was formed by members of this group, and today's Maya are generally descended from people who lived within that historical region. Today they inhabit southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and westernmost El Salvador and Honduras.
Mayan Sign Language is a sign language used in Mexico and Guatemala by Mayan communities with unusually high numbers of deaf inhabitants. In some instances, both hearing and deaf members of a village may use the sign language. It is unrelated to the national sign languages of Mexico and Guatemala, as well as to the local spoken Mayan languages and Spanish.
Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov was a Soviet and Russian linguist, epigrapher, and ethnographer. He became the founder of the Soviet school of Mayan studies, and his identification of the existence of syllabic signs proved an essential step forward in the eventual decipherment of the Mayan script, the writing system used by the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica.
Linda Schele was an American Mesoamerican archaeologist who was an expert in the field of Maya epigraphy and iconography. She played an invaluable role in the decipherment of much of the Maya hieroglyphs. She produced a massive volume of drawings of stelae and inscriptions, which, following her wishes, are free for use to scholars. In 1978, she founded the annual Maya Meetings at The University of Texas at Austin.
Tatiana Proskouriakoff was a Russian-American Mayanist scholar and archaeologist who contributed significantly to the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphs, the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica.
Michelle "Shelly" Zimbalist Rosaldo was a social, linguistic, and psychological anthropologist famous for her studies of the Ilongot people in the Philippines and for her pioneering role in women's studies and the anthropology of gender.
Floyd Glenn Lounsbury was an American linguist, anthropologist and Mayanist scholar and epigrapher, best known for his work on linguistic and cultural systems of a variety of North and South American languages. Equally important were his contributions to understanding the hieroglyphs, culture and history of the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.
Stanley Ann Dunham was an American anthropologist who specialized in the economic anthropology and rural development of Indonesia. She was the mother of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States.
Macro-Mayan is a proposal linking the clearly established Mayan family with neighboring families that show similarities to Mayan. The term was apparently coined by McQuown (1942), but suggestions for historical relationships relevant to this hypothesis can be traced back to the Squier (1861), who offered comparisons between Mayan and Mixe-Zoquean languages, and Radin, who did the same for Mixe-Zoquean, Huave, and Mayan.
Nikolai Grube is a German epigrapher. He was born in Bonn in 1962. Grube entered the University of Hamburg in 1982 and graduated in 1985. His doctoral thesis was published at the same university in 1990. After he received his doctorate, Grube moved to the University of Bonn. Nikolai Grube has been heavily involved in the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphic script.
June C. Nash was a social and feminist anthropologist and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She conducted extensive field work throughout the United States and Latin America, most notably in Bolivia, Mexico and Guatemala. She was also a part of feminist and working class social movements such as that of the Zapatistas in Mexico.
Ruth Leah Bunzel was an American anthropologist, known for studying creativity and art among the Zuni people (A:Shiwi), researching the Mayas in Guatemala, and conducting a comparative study of alcoholism in Guatemala and Mexico. Bunzel was the first American anthropologist to conduct substantial research in Guatemala. Her doctoral dissertation, The Pueblo Potter (1929) was a study of the creative process of art in anthropology and Bunzel was one of the first anthropologists to study the creative process.
VictoriaReiflerBricker is an American anthropologist, ethnographer and linguist, widely known for her ground-breaking studies of contemporary and historical Maya culture.
Penelope Brown is an American anthropological linguist who has studied a number of aspects of cross-linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cross-cultural studies of language and cognition.
Mary Margaret Clark (1925–2003) was an American medical anthropologist who is credited with founding the sub-discipline of medical anthropology.
Vera Mae Green was an American anthropologist, educator, and scholar, who made major contributions in the fields of Caribbean studies, interethnic studies, black family studies and the study of poverty and the poor. She was one of the first African-American Caribbeanists and the first to focus on Dutch Caribbean culture. She developed a "methodology for the study of African American Anthropology" that acknowledged the diversity among and within black families, communities and cultures. Her other areas of research included mestizos in Mexico and communities in India and Israel. "[C]ommitted to the betterment of the human condition", Green also focused her efforts toward international human rights.
Elin Corey Danien (1929–2019) was an American anthropologist and scholar of ancient Maya ceramics. She was an expert on Chamá pottery: polychrome, cylindrical vases produced in the eighth century CE in the highlands of what is now Guatemala. After earning BA, MA, and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Danien worked at the Penn Museum, where she conducted and published research, developed exhibits, initiated public outreach events including "Member's Nights" and an annual "Maya Weekend", and later, after retirement, volunteered as a docent. She co-founded the Museum's Pre-Columbian Society, which gathered professional and amateur scholars interested in indigenous peoples of the Americas. As a philanthropist, she founded a scholarship program called Bread Upon the Waters which gave women over age thirty the opportunity to pursue and complete undergraduate degrees at the University of Pennsylvania through part-time study. A colleague remembered her as someone who was "more than a force of nature," and who often claimed that, "Archaeology is the most fun you can have with your pants on."
Barbara Helen Tedlock was an American cultural anthropologist and oneirologist. She was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Her work explores cross-cultural understanding and communication of dreams, ethnomedicine, and aesthetics and focuses on the indigenous Zuni of the Southwestern United States and the Kʼicheʼ Maya of Mesoamerica. Through her study and practice of the healing traditions of the Kʼicheʼ Maya of Guatemala, Tedlock became initiated into shamanism. She was the collaborator and wife of the late anthropologist and poet Dennis Tedlock.
Elda Miriam Aldasoro Maya is a Mexican biologist, anthropologist and popularizer. She is a pioneer in the study of ethnoentomology in Mexico and of interdisciplinary research that uses theoretical approaches from biology and anthropology to study ethnobiology from a political, economic, social and cultural perspective. Her work has contributed to the documentation of indigenous knowledge, the promotion of activities around community development, the implementation and design of participatory methodologies, as well as biocultural education activities.
