El. knyga: Road to Ruins

Ian Graham was thirty-five before he found what he wanted to be when he grew up. Born in 1923 to an aristocratic family, Graham grew up with a bevy of relatives caught between Victorian standards and post-war freedoms. After a stint in the navy, he became a photographer. On a trip to America, he wandered into Mexico. There he became intrigued with the ruins of the Mayan culture. He began exploring and photographing the engravings and wall paintings. This led to a career of over fifty years in which he made drawings and photos of thousands of Mayan inscriptions and became part of many archaeological digs. His memoir is told in a delightful, often bemused, fashion. While much of his story concentrates on his days in Central America and the work to preserve Mayan relics, it is also an intensely personal diary of a man who occasionally seems to have walked out of a Wodehouse novel. It is very enjoyable, even if one is not knowledgeable about the Maya. A lighter-weight edition would make it perfect vacation reading. Annotation ©2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) For anyone who ever wanted to be an archaeologist, Ian Graham could be a hero. This lively memoir chronicles Grahams 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 Grahams 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.Grahams 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.