Tatiana Proskouriakoff, or Tania as she was called by her colleagues, was an archaeologist, artist and epigrapher famous for her architectural renderings of ancient Maya cities as well as for her study of hieroglyphic writing after which we all now can read the historical content of most Maya carved texts.
Tatiana Proskouriakoff was born in Siberia in 1909. His father was a selling agent for the Russian tsar and was commissioned to control the munitions the United States was selling to the tsar's army. For this reason, and to escape the revolution, Tatiana and her family moved to the US in 1916.
In 1930 she graduated from Pennsylvania State University in architecture and wanted to start a career as an architectural designer. However, in the middle of the Depression era, very few construction projects were being planned in the US and she started looking for something else in those difficult days.
Encounter with Maya Archaeology
Looking for a job, Proskouriakoff replied to an announcement posted on the bulletin board of her university. Archaeologist Linton Satterthwaite was looking for an artist to join his project at the Classic Maya site of Piedras Negras, in Guatemala, to work on the artistic reconstruction of ancient Maya buildings and the site layout. She worked at Piedras Negras from 1934 to 1938.
This was a major turning point in Proskouriakoff’s life. She started making drawings of the Piedras Negras acropolis; after that she was funded by the Carnegie Institution to visit different Maya sites, such as Copan, Chichén Itzá, Uxmal, and Kabah, and produce architectural reconstructions of their main buildings. Her famous perspective drawings were collected and published in An Album of Maya Architecture (Proskouriakoff 1946).
Tatiana Proskouriakoff and the Historical Content of Maya Hieroglyphs
Despite her important contribution to the study of Maya architecture, the reason Proskouriakoff is renowned in Maya studies is her discovery that Maya hieroglyphics contained historical and not simply astronomical or calendrical information. This was a breakthrough discovery in Maya studies. Even more, it was a milestone discovery made by a woman in a field mainly dominated at that time by male scholars.
While working on tracing style changes on Maya monuments, especially stelae (freestanding stone monuments) in the site of Piedras Negras, Proskouriakoff realized that the earliest date recorded on each monument was always preceded by a specific glyph that she dubbed “initial dates” or “birthdates”. Then she noticed that these glyphs always occurred between 12 and 30 years before another series of glyphs and dates that she interpreted as the “accession to the throne”. For the first time it could be proved that Maya monuments were recording life events of real people, actual Maya kings and queens, and not astronomical cycles or supernatural beings.
Until Proskouriakoff’s discovery and publication in 1960, Mayanists were convinced that Maya hieroglyphic texts recorded only numbers, dates and astronomical cycles, and that the mysterious figures carved in the monuments were deities or priests. This was in part a result of the fact that only the numerical portion of the texts had been decoded, and in part it was due to the enduring idea that Maya ruins were empty ceremonial centers and Maya society was ruled by priests obsessed with time.
Proskouriakoff could not actually decipher and read the texts on the monuments; this would happen some time later thanks to another Russian scholar, Yuri Knorozov, who Tatiana met once in her only visit to Russia. However, her study demonstrated the very much mundane nature of Maya society whose rulers were obsessed with recording their victories, conquests, royal dynasties, accession to power and so on.
Tatiana Proskouriakoff’s Legacy
Tatiana Proskouriakoff was a leading scholar in Maya studies, and during her long academic career was associated with prestigious research institutes like Carnegie Institution of Washington and the Peabody Museum at Harvard. She was the Honorary Curator of Maya Art for the Peabody Museum from 1958 to 1977, and was honoured with many prestigious awards both in the United States as well as in Guatemala. She died in 1985 at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Proskouriakoff’s Selected Works
1944 An Inscription on a Jade Probably Carved at Piedras Negras. Carnegie Institution of Washington. Division of Historical Research. Notes on Middle American Archaeology and Ethnology 2(47):142-47. Washington, D.C.
1946 An Album of Mayan Architecture. Carnegie Institution of Washington. Publication 558. Washington, D.C.
1960 Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala. American Antiquity 25(4): 454-75.
Sources
This glossary entry is a part of the About.com guide to Mesoamerica , and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Marcus Joyce, 1988, Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909-1985), in Ute Gacs, Aisha Khan, Jerrie McIntyre, and Ruth Weinberg (eds.), Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary, Greenwood Press, New York, Westport, Connecticut, and London. pp. 297-302
Solomon, Char, 2002, Tatiana Proskouriakoff: Interpreting the Ancient Maya, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.