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For anyone who ever wished to be an archaeologist, Ian Graham is actually a hero. This energetic memoir chronicles Graham's job as the "last explorer" and a fierce advocate for the protection and preservation of Maya sites and monuments across Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Additionally it is full of excitement and high population, for the self-deprecating Graham traveled to remote lands such as Afghanistan in wonderful company. He instructs entertaining tales about his encounters with a bunch of notables, you start with Rudyard Kipling, a family friend from Graham's childhood. Created in 1923 into an aristocratic family descended from Oliver Cromwell, Ian Graham was informed at Winchester, Cambridge, and Trinity College or university, Dublin. His job in Mesoamerican archaeology can be said to have started in 1959 when he turned south in his Rolls Royce and began traveling through the Maya lowlands photographing ruins. He spent some time working as an musician, cartographer, and professional photographer, and has mapped and noted inscriptions at a huge selection of Maya sites, persevering under tough 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 or college. He was given a MacArthur Groundwork "genius grant" in 1981, and he continued to be the Maya Corpus program director until his retirement in 2004. Graham's careful recordings of Maya inscriptions are often acknowledged with making the deciphering of Maya hieroglyphics possible. But it is the relationship of his work and the graceful conversational style of his writing that produce this autobiography must reading, not only for Mayanists but also for anyone with a preference for the experience of archaeology.
