David H. Kelley

David Humiston Kelley (April 1, 1924 in Albany, New York – May 19, 2011) was a Canadian American archaeologist and epigrapher, most noted for his work on the phonetic analysis and major contributions toward the decipherment of the writing system used by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the Maya script.

David Kelley was a descendant of Amos Humiston, a Union Army soldier who was killed at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

From the late 1950s, he was one of the first Mayanist scholars to give credence to the theories of the Russian linguist and ethnographer Yuri Knorozov concerning the phonetic and syllabic nature of the Maya script, which would later lead to breakthroughs in the script's decipherment. Kelley's landmark 1962 paper, Phoneticism in the Maya Script, would provide important corroborating data of the phonetic interpretation of Maya glyphs, which ran counter to the then-prevailing view that the script lacked phonetic elements.

In addition to his work on scripts and linguistics, he worked on calendrics and archaeoastronomy, particularly on application of archaeoastronomical data to the Maya calendar correlation problem. Kelley and Eugene Milone co-authored Exploring Ancient Skies: An Encyclopedic Survey of Archaeoastronomy (Springer, 2005).

He was also interested in long-range cultural contacts, including trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic voyages ("Diffusionism").

He also published frequently on mediaeval and ancient genealogies, publishing papers on the Carolingians, the Jewish Exilarchs and the Nibelungs. He was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists in 1970.

...
Wikipedia