Treasure Seekers: Code of the Maya Kings Page #6

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the physical originals-

The drawings,

some of the archeological stuff,

the limestone carvings they had

brought back at great labor.

Thank goodness for the books.

And I thank the Fates everyday

that somebody at Harper and Brothers

Publishers in New York

had the foresight to heavily

illustrate the book,

because what a shame

if the drawings had been lost.

Fortunately, before he died,

Catherwood issued exquisite folios

of some of the drawings.

They inspired generations of

explores to follow the intrepid pair

to the land of the Maya.

But Stephens' insights would have

a different fate.

His greatest intuition-that

the Maya had written the real stories

of their lives on the monuments-

would be ignored.

The legions of archeologists

who came after him were able

to decipher some of the glyphs,

but only those that spoke of numbers,

dates and the stars.

Carried away by the discovery that the

ancient Maya were great astronomers,

archeologists fashioned a picture

of them as peaceful stargazers,

obsessed with calendars and time.

When John Lloyd Stephens

had looked at the monuments,

he had seen real kings and queens.

One hundred years later,

archeologists saw only the calculations

of anonymous timekeepers.

It would take a fresh set of eyes

to finally unravel the secrets of Maya

carvings and prove that

Stephens was right.

The story of Tatiana Proskouriakoff

is not well known

outside the realm of Maya studies.

Yet, in that field she is a giant,

a woman in a man's world

who saw further

and deeper than her

more famous contemporaries.

What we know of

the ancient Maya today,

the exciting revelations emerging

from dozens of excavations

is built on her work.

Speaking of Copan, she was the first

to describe its ruins as a puzzle.

She was the one who supplied

the missing piece.

Tatiana, or Tanya,

as her friends called her,

was born in Tomsk,

Siberia in 1909.

Her mother, the daughter of

a prominent general, was a physician.

Her father, a chemist.

World War I shattered

their peaceful existence.

In 1915, Tanya's father was sent

to the United States

to supervise arms manufacturing

for the czar.

With the coming of

the Russian Revolution,

the family was trapped and began

a new life in suburban Philadelphia.

At work on the first biography

of Proskouriakoff,

Char Solomon has been uncovering

these early details of her life.

Tanya's story is compelling to me

because she was born in Russia

at such a tumultuous time.

She came to the United States.

She acquired English

as a second language,

and mastered it in such a way that it

became the equivalent of

her first language.

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