Then David Kelley and Floyd Lounsbury analyzed inscriptions from the temple to determine that the occupant of the sarcophagus was named "Shield", or Pakal (originally spelled Pacal, then Hanab-Pakal and now K'inich Janahb' Pakal). Pakal the Great ruled Palenque for most of his 80 years, and it was reasonable to conclude that he had built the Temple of Inscriptions as his own burial monument. But Ruz was disturbed by the fact that the bones in the sarcophagus appeared to belong to a man some forty years younger than Pakal at the time of his death. Preliminary analysis from the bones indicated a middle-aged male, but this analysis was never published for scientists to examine, confirm or reject. A subsequent report in 1971 seemed to confirm the earlier finding based on limited wear on the skeleton's teeth. Meanwhile, epigraphers--scholars who study and interpret inscriptions--had determined definitively the dates of Pakal's birth and his death at an advanced age. "Lord Shield Pacal was by all accounts a most remarkable man," wrote Peter Mathews and Linda Schele in a presentation to the First Palenque Round Table in 1974. "Apparently in power, at least in name, by the age of 12 1/2, he ruled for almost 70 years. His was a dominant influence at Palenque and he was surely the man responsible for its sudden blossoming c. 9.10.0.0.0 into a major Classic site." Mathews and Schele had no doubt that the body found deep beneath the Temple of the Incriptions was that of Pakal. Yet a controversy has raged over the epigraphical findings. It has at times been viewed as a conflict between "scientific" and "non-scientific" research, that is, the methods of anthropologists and forensic scientists versus those of epigraphers. Schele and Mathews respond as follows in The Code of Kings (1998): For our part, we have always maintained that the arithmetic involved in analyzing the inscriptional dates of Hanab-Pakal is incontrovertible, whether or not our proposed interpretations of specific events are overturned. To prevent ambiguity, Palenque's scribes tied Hanab-Pakal's birth, accession, and death to the Long Count and to named k'atun-endings that recur only once every 375,000 years. And...they also tied his birth and accession dates to the end of the first piktun, which will occur in A.D. 4772. Thus, if his dates are to be changed, they must move at least 375,000 years into the future. Or as Schele put it in 1992 (in Ancient Mesoamerica 3 ): The last argument against the chronology is that in some way the epigraphers do not understand what the Maya intended to say--that, for example, two people are being named as one person, that the history is a fabrication, or that some special way of dealing with time was being used. Concerning these possibilities, I can only say that each of these propositions requires that all of the inscriptional data that use the same calendrics or historical glyphs must be thrown out with the Palenque data, including all knowledge about the Maya and the Mesoamerican calendar in precolumbian, colonial, and modern contexts. This includes the entirety of Tatiana Proskouriakoff's 'historical hypothesis' and all of the histories that have been published for all Maya sites. Schele and Mathews point to a 1996 personal communication from Allen Christenson, a dentist who has worked extensively with the Smithsonian in forensic analysis, that "wear is not a factor in elite dentition as they likely had a diet with more boiled atole which caused little wear." And Norman Hammond and T. Molleson (1994, Mexicon 16 ) are cited to the effect that "people who survive to advanced age in any population naturally have 'young bones' compared to their contemporaries. These survivors do not age as rapidly as other members of the same population, so they might look younger to physical anthropologists assessing their age from skeletal remains."