When the Institute was founded in the autumn of 1971, by a small group of independent students of pre-Columbian art, the field of Maya studies was largely a private pursuit. There were perhaps a dozen institutions in the United States with any serious interest in the matter, and the decipherment of the glyphic script was still considered, by some, an open question.

In the half-century since, the Institute has carried the conversation forward in three principal ways: through the Newsletter, now in its six-hundred-and-sixtieth issue; through the Wednesday lecture series, which enters its ninth decade this autumn; and through the working archive, sustained quietly by our membership.

This issue resumes a thread begun in the late 1970s with Dr. Linda Schele's first contributions to the bulletin — a thread now carried by a third generation of fellows, working in the field and in the academy in equal measure.