> she revealed herself as a passionately communicative educator who believed the public deserved to share in the excitement of the work they were funding and delighted in presenting her discoveries directly to them. Others tapped into her inspirational gift for relating an ancient culture to our modern world and, amongst many keynote speeches at conferences and university commencements, NASA invited her to address their key staff on the relevance of understanding another world view. An outsider, in her own words an edgewalker, all her career, Linda had been an artist and teacher when the Maya captured her imagination. She had erupted into the field as a young woman just some strange little painter from Alabama in an academic discipline dominated by male archaeologists, just at the time when the investigation of the so called Mysterious Maya was about to become the most dynamic area in the rediscovery of the ancient past.

> it was to be at Palenque that she was first to play a crucial role in breaking the code of the Maya's hieroglyphic writing system. Her mission was to interpret and explain the historic Maya world of city states, kings, rulers, and religion to her own world. But, by working with the modern Maya peoples of Mexico and Guatemala, she began to understand the links between the Indian peoples own rich indigenous culture and their ancient past; and she began to hand back to these oppressed people the tools to repossess their history. This was what Linda Schele considered her most important work.