author
Charles P. (Charles Pickering) Bowditch
1842–1921
A Boston financier turned pioneering Maya scholar, he helped transform early American research on Mesoamerica through both his own studies and his generous support of the Peabody Museum at Harvard.
3 Audiobooks
Memoranda on the Maya Calendars Used in the Books of Chilan Balam
by Charles P. (Charles Pickering) Bowditch
Was the Beginning Day of the Maya Month Numbered Zero (or Twenty) or One?
by Charles P. (Charles Pickering) Bowditch
Mayan Nomenclature
by Charles P. (Charles Pickering) Bowditch
About the author
Born in Boston in 1842, Charles Pickering Bowditch came from the notable Bowditch family and graduated from Harvard. After serving in the Civil War, he built a career in business, but he became best known for his deep interest in the ancient Maya.
A trip to Yucatán in the late 1880s sparked the work that defined much of his later life. Bowditch studied Maya inscriptions and calendrical systems, earned a reputation as an important early interpreter of Maya epigraphy, and supported archaeological and anthropological research in Central America.
He was also a major patron of scholarship, especially through Harvard's Peabody Museum, and later served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1917 to 1919. He died in 1921, remembered both for his own research and for the institutions and fieldwork he helped make possible.