Living Maya people have long been rendered by Western researchers, or Mayanists, in racialized, demeaning, and condescending ways that contrast with the reverence these academics hold for the materiality of the ancient Maya past. My dissertation turns a decolonial lens onto the origins of this condition, analyzing how early Mayanist research on the ancient Maya by the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Carnegie Institute of Washington acted as a form of epistemic colonization. Early anthropological and archaeological research co-opted and distorted the ancient Maya past by filtering it through the desires, anxieties, and social and institutional contexts of the Mayanist researchers who conducted it, while also diminishing or omitting the participation of living Maya people in the research process. Through critical analysis on the content of research produced by these institutions from 1890 to 1940, the inscribed social history of this incipient research tracks the emergence of the Mayanist as a scholar and the Maya as an object of study. A decolonial reading on this material first deconstructs this early Mayanist production of knowledge and the subjectivities, affects, and positional biases which helped determine the shape and direction of early research on the Maya past. Thereafter, the rest of the dissertation rearticulates, foregrounds, and restores the participation of living Maya people into this early research that was conducted on their own past. In the process, ultimately this dissertation demonstrates how these Indigenous people have been actively participating – but been buried – from the start.