[6] Knorozov based his studies on De Landa's phonetic alphabet and is credited with originally breaking the Maya code.

In his Harvard dissertation at La Victoria, Guatemala, he established the first secure chronology of ceramics for southern Mesoamerica.

[11] At Yale University he taught the Mayanists Peter Mathews, Karl Taube, and Stephen D. Houston, the latter of whom collaborated with David Stuart.

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.

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 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.

[12] 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.

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.

[14] Coe added qualified support to the "Cultura Madre" view of the Olmec as the "mother culture of Mesoamerican civilization".