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Nikolai Grube

German Mesoamericanist

Nikolai Grube
Nikolai Grube at the 1994 Maya Meeting
Born	1962 Bonn
Occupation(s)	Epigrapher Mayanist

Nikolai Grube is a German epigrapher.^[1] He was born in Bonn in 1962.^[2] Grube entered the University of Hamburg in 1982 and graduated in 1985.^[2] His doctoral thesis was published at the same university in 1990.^[2] After he received his doctorate, Grube moved to the University of Bonn.^[3] Nikolai Grube has been heavily involved in the decipherment of the Maya hieroglyphic script.^[4]

He has served as professor of anthropology and art history at both the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Bonn.^[5] At the University of Bonn he has worked in the Seminar for Ethnology.^[2] He has worked with several archaeological projects in the Maya region, including those at CaracolinBelize and Yaxha in the Petén DepartmentofGuatemala.^[5] He has also occupied a position at the University of Hamburg.^[6] He is fluent in the Yucatec language of the modern Maya inhabitants of the Yucatán PeninsulaofMexico.^[6] Nikolai Grube worked with Linda Schele in presenting hieroglyphic workshops for native Mayan speakers in Mexico and Guatemala.^[7]

In the 1990s he visited Naachtun in Petén and recorded the inscriptions on the Maya stelae.^[8] He is credited with deciphering the ancient name of the kingdom from the hieroglyphic inscription on Stela 1 at the city.^[8] Grube, together with fellow epigrapher Simon Martin, proposed that Maya politics of the Classic Period were dominated by two so-called "superstates" ruled by the rival cities of Tikal and Calakmul.^[9]

From 1992 to 1995 Grube received funding from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ("German Research Foundation") for a project investigating the oral traditions of the Cruzoob Maya of Mexico.^[3] In 2010 Nikolai Grube served as one of the directors of the Interdisciplinary Latin America Center at the University of Bonn.^[10] Nikolai Grube is co-editor of the Mexicon journal and is a consultant for the Mexican magazine Arqueología Mexicana ("Mexican Archaeology").^[3]

Since 2014 Nikolai Grube is directing the project Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan, which has a projected run-time of fifteen years.^[11] It is housed in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bonn and was established with funding from the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts.^[12] The goal of the project is to conduct computer-based studies of all extant Maya hieroglyphic texts from an epigraphic and cultural-historical standpoint, and to produce and publish a database and a comprehensive dictionary of the Classic Mayan language.

• "Works of Nikolai Grube". Google Scholar.