of a young Soviet scientist, immediately realized 'who got the victory'." In 1959, examining what she called "a peculiar pattern of dates" on stone monument inscriptions at the Classic Maya site of Piedras Negras, Russian-American scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff determined that these represented events in the lifespan of an individual, rather than relating to religion, astronomy, or prophecy, as held by the "old school" exemplified by Thompson. This proved to be true of many Maya inscriptions, and revealed the Maya epigraphic record to be one relating actual histories of ruling individuals: dynastic histories similar in nature to those recorded in other human cultures throughout the world. Suddenly, the Maya entered written history. Although it was then clear what was on many Maya inscriptions, they still could not literally be read. However, further progress was made during the 1960s and 1970s, using a multitude of approaches including pattern analysis, de Landa's "alphabet", Knorozov's breakthroughs, and others. In the story of Maya decipherment, the work of archaeologists, art historians, epigraphers, linguists, and anthropologists cannot be separated. All contributed to a process that was truly and essentially multidisciplinary. Key figures included David Kelley, Ian Graham, Gilette Griffin, and Michael Coe. A new wave of breakthroughs occurred in the early 1970s, in particular at the first Mesa Redonda de Palenque, a scholarly conference organized by Merle Greene Robertson at the Maya site of Palenque and held in December, 1973. A working group consisting of Linda Schele, then a studio artist and art instructor, Floyd Lounsbury, a linguist from Yale, and Peter Mathews, then an undergraduate student of David Kelley's at the University of Calgary (whom Kelley sent because he could not attend). In one afternoon they reconstructed most of the dynastic list of Palenque, building on the earlier work of Heinrich Berlin. By identifying a sign as an important royal title (now read as the recurring name Kʼinich), the group was able to identify and "read" the life histories (from birth, to accession to the throne, to death) of six kings of Palenque. Palenque was the focus of much epigraphic work through the late 1970s, but linguistic decipherment of texts remained very limited. From that point, progress proceeded rapidly. Scholars such as J. Kathryn Josserand, Nick Hopkins and others published findings that helped to construct a Mayan vocabulary. The "old school" continued to resist the results of the new scholarship for some time. A decisive