Michael Coe, who has died aged 90, was an archaeologist and writer who made the ancient world come alive for scholars and public alike. Through books and excavations he explored the origins of the early civilisations of Mexico and Central America, the nature of tropical cities, the painting and calligraphy of the ancient Maya and even Aztec sorcery.

Equipped with a gifted eye for what was important – allied to a feisty disdain for error – he took on accepted wisdoms, exploding them in his books, essays and witty talks. Until Mike’s intervention, for instance, many had seen the Olmec civilisation of Veracruz and Tabasco in Mexico as being later than that of the Maya peoples. But Mike trounced that view. His excavations in early villages of coastal Guatemala and nearby Mexico, and then at the sprawling Olmec city of San Lorenzo, Mexico, confirmed an earlier date (circa 1250-900BC) for Olmec civilisation than previously estimated.

Another canard was that Maya imagery and texts on vases had little importance. Mike’s book The Maya Scribe and His Word (1973) was possibly the most influential tome ever written on Maya art and its hieroglyphic texts. Delivered with eloquence and sparkle, it opened up a world of gods, dread spirits, dynastic scribes and courtly ladies, all legible in the hieroglyphs. Most of the books of this civilisation, the Classic Maya (AD250 to 850), had long rotted away, but Mike found them again – as enduring calligraphy on painted pottery.

Until the emergence of The Maya Scribe and His Word it was also believed that just three books (known as the Maya codices) had survived from the Classic Maya era. But Mike revealed the existence of a fourth, nicknamed “the Grolier”, which is now confirmed to be the earliest surviving volume in the Americas. For a while the Grolier was derided by some as a forgery, but Mike was resoundingly vindicated in 2018 when the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico judged it to be authentic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Coe with one of his discoveries, a carving of a figure with removable arms, maybe representing an ancient ball player, at the Olmec city of San Lorenzo, Veracruz, Mexico, 1967. Photograph: Francisco Beverido/Estate of Michael Coe

It had also been thought that Maya writing was esoteric, with allusive ideas in somewhat random order, the hieroglyphs therefore not being a direct record of language. However, in the 1950s the discovery of phonic syllables such as ba, ta, chu and mu by the Soviet scholar Yuri Knorosov suggested that the Maya recorded pure sounds in their writing system and meant that texts could now be read in the original language. Against the background of the cold war, many, including Eric Thompson, doyen of Maya studies, rejected Knorosov’s findings. But Mike, with the help of his Russian-speaking wife, Sophie (nee Dobzhansky), was able to endorse Knorosov’s phonetic decipherments and, with others, win the argument.

A bibliophile, Mike made sure that his books met the highest standards of design and illustration, resulting in collaborations with artists such as Felipe Dávalos, Diane Griffiths Peck, and Barry Brukoff. His most celebrated work was with Justin Kerr, whose innovative photographs of Classic Maya vases introduced new sources for scholars.

Born in New York to William Coe, a vice-president of the Virginian Railway Company, and Clover (nee Simonton), a dress designer, Mike was descended from a family of immense wealth: his great-grandfather, Henry Huttleston Rogers, was a leading figure in Standard Oil. After St Paul’s school in Concord, New Hampshire, he went to Harvard in 1945, where he initially studied English literature.

A chance visit to Chichen Itza, the Maya ruins in northern Yucatan, led him to switch to anthropology under the guidance of the redoubtable archaeologist Alfred Tozzer, just retired but still a powerful figure at Harvard. But first there was mandatory national service. Recruited by the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, Mike entered the CIA as a case officer and was sent to Taiwan. With characteristic energy he used the opportunity to study Formosan ethnography and learn Mandarin. Side trips to Cambodia and its ruins enlivened his interest in tropical cities.

Returning to Harvard, he completed his dissertation under Gordon Willey, the major figure in Maya archaeology at the time. After a short stint teaching at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville he became a lecturer at Yale University in 1960, remaining there until his retirement in 1994, by which time he was a professor. For the best part of two decades he was also an adviser to Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington DC, which supports scholarship in the field of pre-Columbian studies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maya temples at Tikal, Guatemala. Michael Coe wrote possibly the most influential tome ever published on Maya art and its hieroglyphic texts. Photograph: Domingo Leiva/Getty Images/Flickr RF

Most of his 18 books, published from 1961 onwards, focused on Maya and Olmec civilisation, but he also wrote The True History of Chocolate (with his wife, 1996) and Angkor and the Khmer Civilization (2003). One of his last books, The Line of Forts: Historical Archaeology on the Colonial Frontier of Massachusetts (2013), focused on the northern rim of English America.

Mike would speak and correspond with anyone, and he relished quirky and picaresque people. He found fun in bold theories of the past: Vikings among the Maya, trans-Pacific diffusion and beliefs about ancient America among some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Above all he possessed a joyful curiosity and a spontaneous generosity.

Sophie, whom he married in 1955, predeceased him. He is survived by their five children, Nicholas, Andrew, Sarah, Peter and Natalie.

• Michael Douglas Coe, archaeologist, born 14 May 1929; died 25 September 2019