section_path: History/Investigation of Maya civilization
section_name: Investigation of Maya civilization
paragraph_text: Investigation of Maya civilization
  
  The agents of the Catholic Church wrote detailed accounts of the Maya, in support of their efforts at Christianization, and absorption of the Maya into the Spanish Empire. This was followed by various Spanish priests and colonial officials who left descriptions of ruins they visited in Yucatán and Central America. In 1839, American traveller and writer John Lloyd Stephens set out to visit a number of Maya sites with English architect and draftsman Frederick Catherwood. Their illustrated accounts of the ruins sparked strong popular interest, and brought the Maya to world attention. The later 19th century saw the recording and recovery of ethnohistoric accounts of the Maya, and the first steps in deciphering Maya hieroglyphs.
  
  The final two decades of the 19th century saw the birth of modern scientific archaeology in the Maya region, with the meticulous work of Alfred Maudslay and Teoberto Maler. By the early 20th century, the Peabody Museum was sponsoring excavations at Copán and in the Yucatán Peninsula. In the first two decades of the 20th century, advances were made in deciphering the Maya calendar, and identifying deities, dates, and religious concepts. Since the 1930s, archaeological exploration increased dramatically, with large-scale excavations across the Maya region.
  
  In the 1960s, Mayanist J. Eric S. Thompson promoted the ideas that Maya cities were essentially vacant ceremonial centres serving a dispersed population in the forest, and that the Maya civilization was governed by peaceful astronomer-priests. These ideas began to collapse with major advances in the decipherment of the script in the late 20th century, pioneered by Heinrich Berlin, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and Yuri Knorozov. With breakthroughs in understanding of Maya script since the 1950s, the texts revealed the warlike activities of the Classic Maya kings, undermining the view of the Maya as peaceful.