Coe's graduate advisor was
Gordon Willey. In his Harvard dissertation at La Victoria, Guatemala, he established the first secure chronology of ceramics for southern Mesoamerica. With
Richard Diehl at
San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, he used new
magnetometry techniques to locate and salvage most of the Olmec colossal heads now known, such that he is now considered one of the discoverers of the Olmec. Coe and his students have contributed greatly to the decipherment of Maya writing. He championed
Yuri Knorozov and the phonetic approach to decipherment, against the public rebukes of
J. E. S. Thompson. At Yale University he taught the Mayanists
Peter Mathews,
Karl Taube, and
Stephen D. Houston, the latter of whom collaborated with
David Stuart. He sometimes collaborated with his Yale colleague, anthropological linguist
Floyd Lounsbury. Coe also advised the authors of
The Blood of Kings, a work about Classic Maya rulership,
Mary Ellen Miller, at Yale, and
Linda Schele, at the University of Texas at Austin. Coe's
Breaking the Maya Code (1992), which describes these breakthroughs, was nominated for a National Book Award. Coe was the first to date El Baúl Stela 1 correctly (Coe 1957; cf. Parsons 1986:61); this sculpture from the Southern Maya Area (SMA) is one of three known with Cycle 7 Long-count dated monuments, predating all Lowland Long-count dated sculptures. With
Kent V. Flannery, he was the first to observe that the greatest southern area site,
Kaminaljuyu, probably profited greatly from its proximity to and exploitation of the enormous
El Chayal obsidian fields. Coe discovered the Primary Standard Sequence, a sequence of hieroglyphs appearing around the rim of many Classic Maya ceramic vessels. Coe organized an exhibit of some of those ceramics at the
Grolier Club in New York, where he also publicized, for the first time, a newly-discovered
Maya codex — the first found in the Americas — and only the fourth known to exist. Some of Coe's other insights were given in casual comments to his students or in short reports, including that the
Popol Vuh was but a fragment of a great lost pan-Maya mythology, and that Classic Maya rulers were shamanic figures as well as administrators. Aside from his work on the Maya, his short paper published during the height of
processual archaeology, entitled "The Churches on the Green", which imagined how that approach would fail to discern the origins and purpose of three churches on the
New Haven Green if they were studied five thousand years later. His book on the
Angkor civilization of ancient Cambodia,
Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (2003, 2nd ed. 2018), was described by
David P. Chandler as "the most thoroughgoing, accessible, and persuasive synthesis of precolonial Cambodian history, society and culture" that he had ever read.
Debates Coe added qualified support to the "Cultura Madre" view of the Olmec as the "mother culture of Mesoamerican civilization". His use of information obtainable from looted Maya ceramics attracted criticism. Some of Coe's work in the Olmec field came under scrutiny by two scholars of
Pre-Columbian art. For example, his work on the
Cascajal Block and on the
Wrestler was called into question. The scholars disputed his claims and found his work inadequately supported by evidence. The Cascajal block was argued to have many features fully consistent with Olmec imagery. The same was said for the
Wrestler. Their criticisms were based on what the other scholars considered poorly defined or undefined notions of Olmec iconography and of rulership. ==Personal life==