Simon Martin entered the field of Mayanist research with a professional background in graphic design. He attended the Royal College of Art in London during the 1980s, completing his Master's in Communication Arts in 1987. As a professional designer he worked in televisual media into the mid-1990s, for production companies designing visual elements and programmed content for TV, film and commercials. Martin had been fascinated by the Maya civilisation since childhood. After a period spent in independent study and research, in the late 1980s Martin began attending Mesoamericanist conferences and Maya hieroglyphics workshops. In parallel with his work in the design profession Martin corresponded with scholars active in Maya research, and travelled to Central America to visit some of the Maya archaeological sites. His reading proficiency and knowledge of Maya inscriptions was soon recognised in the field, and by the mid-1990s Martin was operating as an honorary research fellow at UCL's Institute of Archaeology. He gained his doctorate at the same institution in 2014. Martin secured a residential fellowship grant from Washington D.C.'s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in pre-Columbian studies for the 1996/97 academic year. The fellowship allowed Martin to later move into Mayanist research as his full-time profession. In 2003 Martin took up a position as the research specialist in Maya epigraphy at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Museum, from where he has continued to conduct field reconnaissances to the Maya lowlands, write research papers and act as scholarly consultant for several museum exhibitions of Maya art and artefacts. He co-curated the "Maya 2012: Lords of Time" in 2012 at Penn Museum, and in 2019 completed the full re-installtion of its Mexico and Central America Gallery. For the academic year 2019-2020 he was awarded the Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas at the Library of Congress. In 2020 he published the book Ancient Maya Politics: A Political Anthropology of the Classic Period 150-900 CE, an extended re-analysis of the political data in the inscriptions and proposals for the underlying mechanisms at work.
Research
In the early 1990s Martin was at the forefront of epigraphic research that would challenge some prevailing views on the nature of Maya lowland states and their political interactions during the Mid- to Late-Classic period. Archaeologists and epigraphers had generally conceived the Maya lowlands region of this era as a mosaic of dozens of polities or city-states, each controlling only a small surrounding territory and acting more or less independently of the others. These states were engaged in alternating episodes of warfare and alliance with one another, but such interactions had been assessed as primarily local and transient in nature. However, evidence for the hierarchical ranking of kings overturned this concept and replaced it with a model in which a few dominant kingdoms exercised control over others in wide-ranging and enduring elite networks.
