I'm not sure what it is about those of us from southern Ohio, where I was born, who are educated in Pennsylvania, as I was, and then find themselves drawn, through some strange inevitability, to the ruins of Mayan culture in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala. It is usually through peculiar set of coincidences, as was certainly true for me and for today's profile.
I occasionally write of archaeologists, as that field was the object of my first, true academic affection, and it was where I met the academics whom I admired then and admire still. As fortunate as I've been having great professors, scholars, writers, translators, and historians provide my education, including one Nobel Peace Prize winner, it is the archaeologists who carried best that balance between esoteric knowledge and hard-headed pragmatism.
Permit me to quote from myself:
Once upon a time, when I studied archaeology, my world was divided into two distinct groups: Diggers and Squints.
Squints worked in laboratories with elaborate machines that were known by esoteric terminology and were so complicated that they looked like something from one of Jack Kirby's nightmares or sparky whirligigs from the old Universal Pictures "Frankenstein" movies. Squints would take items of great antiquity, place them in their infernal devices, and then tell us, with rather smug precision, how old the piece was, what it was made from, and whether or not it was important enough to study further or place within the museum's permanent collection.
Diggers, on the other hand, were those in the field who, sometimes at great personal peril, found the remote treasures of the past using the eldest tools of the human race: Shovels and trowels. Diggers were at turns historians, contractors, linguists, soldiers, diplomats, and detectives. Those talented in the sciences tended to become Squints; those less easy to categorize favored the ranks of Diggers. Naturally, I, and everyone I knew, wanted to be a Digger.
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| The view from the top of the Culhuacan Pyramid with The Coracle's host |
It has always fascinated me, when a particular Hollywood movie character was invented, how many biographers and curators sought to tie their subjects with a fictional person. At any given time during the last nearly forty years, Sylvanus Morely, Hiram Bingham, T.E. Lawrence, Roy Chapman Andrews, Gertrude Bell, Percy Fawcett, Giovanni Belzoni, and even Sir Richard Burton have been referred to as "the real Indiana Jones". Nothing could be more absurd, especially since the creators of "Jones" admit he was based not on a real-life person, but on other movie characters. Still, the temptation to make fiction real is narcotic.
However, in the real world of archaeology, one finds people who are beyond any Polo Lounge "artist's" limited and cartoonish imagination, as truth is often far more vivid and inspiring than fiction. One marvelous example of this is Tatiana Proskouriakoff, from whom anything we know of the Mayan culture is due to her brilliant work.
While born in Russia in 1909, Proskouriakoff moved with her family to Dayton, Ohio during the Russian Revolution. At an early age she displayed remarkable linguistic aptitude, reportedly able to read both Russian and English by the age of 3 and to draw with mature lucidity. From that time forward, art and words would serve as her media.
By her senior year in high school, Proskouriakoff's family had moved to Pennsylvania and, as she was her class valedictorian, she was readily accepted into the Keystone State's university system, originally receiving a degree in architecture. However, her innate ability for language and art brought her to the attention of the burgeoning archeology and anthropology program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she began to work for the progenitor of Mayan studies, Lincoln Satterthwaite.
Archaeological work had just begun on what would become a premier site for the study of the Maya, a culture that resists revealing all of its secrets even in our contemporary, technology-driven age. In the Usumacinta River basin in Guatemala, in the late 19th century, a German archaeologist named Teoberto Maler had stumbled across some well-preserved stones bearing pictographs and hieroglyphs. The stones, known as stela [pronounced as "steel-la"] were of such significant value that Maler, who abhorred the practice of his era of ripping such stela away from its site and transporting it to labs and museums, mostly kept the discovery quiet in order to maintain the site's integrity. He did, however, take numerous photographs of the evidence.
By 1931, the photographs, which had been filed away at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, had been re-discovered by Satterwaite and his colleagues. As no significant progress had been made in their translation, what is now the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archeology and Anthropology funded a major, multi-year expedition to Guatemala to study the undisturbed site. One of the chief goals of the expedition was correctly to catalogue the Maya construction captured in Maler's photos, with special consideration of the Maya's curious language.
For such a goal, the expedition needed an artist with a facility for language and there were no better candidates than Proskouriakoff. She had already displayed her talents for artistic renderings of ancient structures as a volunteer at the university's museum, so Satterwaite knew that she was perfect for the job. In 1936, Proskouriakoff arrived at the site, known by its expedition name of Piedras Negras.
An aside: For those wondering, it was not unusual for women to be members of archaeological expeditions. Since scientific archaeology's earliest days, women had not only served beside men at dig sites, and certainly in the labs and museums, but had even led expeditions. Well-funded expeditions tended to permit rather comfortable camp sites for those involved, too.
Proskouriakoff pioneered the field of what came to be known as reconstructive archaeology. Similar to the facial reconstruction that's used for the discovered skulls of ancient peoples, and even victims of crime, remnant structure is the basis of a re-created appearance using scientific logic and generally accepted attributes. Proskouriakoff studied the structure of the Mayan temple and buildings, in particular those framed by the existing stela, and created a panorama of drawings that brought life to the dormant structures, enabling an appreciation of how the Mayan cities appeared at the height of the culture.
While without a university degree specific to the study of Maya culture, once Sylvanus Morely [previously profiled in The Coracle] saw her panoramic drawings upon Proskouriakoff's return to the U.S., he secured funding for expeditions to other Maya sites in Honduras and the Yucatan which, in turn, lead to her receiving a position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington D.C. From there, using her drawings and notes, Proskouriakoff began a serious study of the Mayan language.
The reigning theory in her day was that the hieroglyphs contained information about subjects such as astronomy, the Mayan religion, or prophecy. Not finding much progress with this theory, Proskouriakoff began anew by returning to the original stela of Piedras Negras and noting, with the aid of an older theory posited by Yuri Knorozov, a Russian linguist, and through the repetition of certain pictographs, that the hieroglyphs were instead about the lives of the various rulers, including information about the events that formed their dynasties. Once this theory was realized, like any formerly un-crackable code, the language of the Maya ceased to be opaque and revealed much about this lush, vibrant, and remarkable culture that thrived, and then disappeared, between 2000 B.C. and the 18th century A.D.
By the time her initial translations were completed in the late 1950's, Proskouriakoff was named honorary curator of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a sinecure from which she was able to continue her work in translation and publish over twenty scholarly books on the subject. She would be awarded numerous honors and honorary degrees during the remainder of her life, including the Alfred V. Kidder Award in archaeology [subsequent recipients of this honor receive a medal that was designed by Proskouriakoff herself as she wasn't all that fond of the original design] and the prized Order of the Quetzal, Guatemala's highest civilian award.
While one may still find copies of her popularly written books, including a collection of her reconstructive archaeological drawings, the best way to come to know Proskouriakoff is to tour the Peabody Museum, where her drawings and the stela that she studied are on display, or the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which also houses some of her studies and the subsequent work that has been built on her translations.
After her death at the age of 76 in 1985, Proskouriakoff's remains would be entombed in the foundation of one of the ruins in Piedras Negras, where a simple plaque marks their presence. It has become, in recent years, a place of pilgrimage for those who continue to study the stubborn mysteries of the Maya.
However, in the real world of archaeology, one finds people who are beyond any Polo Lounge "artist's" limited and cartoonish imagination, as truth is often far more vivid and inspiring than fiction. One marvelous example of this is Tatiana Proskouriakoff, from whom anything we know of the Mayan culture is due to her brilliant work.
While born in Russia in 1909, Proskouriakoff moved with her family to Dayton, Ohio during the Russian Revolution. At an early age she displayed remarkable linguistic aptitude, reportedly able to read both Russian and English by the age of 3 and to draw with mature lucidity. From that time forward, art and words would serve as her media.
By her senior year in high school, Proskouriakoff's family had moved to Pennsylvania and, as she was her class valedictorian, she was readily accepted into the Keystone State's university system, originally receiving a degree in architecture. However, her innate ability for language and art brought her to the attention of the burgeoning archeology and anthropology program at the University of Pennsylvania, where she began to work for the progenitor of Mayan studies, Lincoln Satterthwaite.
Archaeological work had just begun on what would become a premier site for the study of the Maya, a culture that resists revealing all of its secrets even in our contemporary, technology-driven age. In the Usumacinta River basin in Guatemala, in the late 19th century, a German archaeologist named Teoberto Maler had stumbled across some well-preserved stones bearing pictographs and hieroglyphs. The stones, known as stela [pronounced as "steel-la"] were of such significant value that Maler, who abhorred the practice of his era of ripping such stela away from its site and transporting it to labs and museums, mostly kept the discovery quiet in order to maintain the site's integrity. He did, however, take numerous photographs of the evidence.
By 1931, the photographs, which had been filed away at the Peabody Museum at Harvard, had been re-discovered by Satterwaite and his colleagues. As no significant progress had been made in their translation, what is now the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archeology and Anthropology funded a major, multi-year expedition to Guatemala to study the undisturbed site. One of the chief goals of the expedition was correctly to catalogue the Maya construction captured in Maler's photos, with special consideration of the Maya's curious language.
For such a goal, the expedition needed an artist with a facility for language and there were no better candidates than Proskouriakoff. She had already displayed her talents for artistic renderings of ancient structures as a volunteer at the university's museum, so Satterwaite knew that she was perfect for the job. In 1936, Proskouriakoff arrived at the site, known by its expedition name of Piedras Negras.
An aside: For those wondering, it was not unusual for women to be members of archaeological expeditions. Since scientific archaeology's earliest days, women had not only served beside men at dig sites, and certainly in the labs and museums, but had even led expeditions. Well-funded expeditions tended to permit rather comfortable camp sites for those involved, too.
Proskouriakoff pioneered the field of what came to be known as reconstructive archaeology. Similar to the facial reconstruction that's used for the discovered skulls of ancient peoples, and even victims of crime, remnant structure is the basis of a re-created appearance using scientific logic and generally accepted attributes. Proskouriakoff studied the structure of the Mayan temple and buildings, in particular those framed by the existing stela, and created a panorama of drawings that brought life to the dormant structures, enabling an appreciation of how the Mayan cities appeared at the height of the culture.
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| For example, with the aid of the archaeological team's input, this becomes... |
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| ...this. The Temple of Xpuhil in its former glory. |
The reigning theory in her day was that the hieroglyphs contained information about subjects such as astronomy, the Mayan religion, or prophecy. Not finding much progress with this theory, Proskouriakoff began anew by returning to the original stela of Piedras Negras and noting, with the aid of an older theory posited by Yuri Knorozov, a Russian linguist, and through the repetition of certain pictographs, that the hieroglyphs were instead about the lives of the various rulers, including information about the events that formed their dynasties. Once this theory was realized, like any formerly un-crackable code, the language of the Maya ceased to be opaque and revealed much about this lush, vibrant, and remarkable culture that thrived, and then disappeared, between 2000 B.C. and the 18th century A.D.
By the time her initial translations were completed in the late 1950's, Proskouriakoff was named honorary curator of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a sinecure from which she was able to continue her work in translation and publish over twenty scholarly books on the subject. She would be awarded numerous honors and honorary degrees during the remainder of her life, including the Alfred V. Kidder Award in archaeology [subsequent recipients of this honor receive a medal that was designed by Proskouriakoff herself as she wasn't all that fond of the original design] and the prized Order of the Quetzal, Guatemala's highest civilian award.
While one may still find copies of her popularly written books, including a collection of her reconstructive archaeological drawings, the best way to come to know Proskouriakoff is to tour the Peabody Museum, where her drawings and the stela that she studied are on display, or the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which also houses some of her studies and the subsequent work that has been built on her translations.
After her death at the age of 76 in 1985, Proskouriakoff's remains would be entombed in the foundation of one of the ruins in Piedras Negras, where a simple plaque marks their presence. It has become, in recent years, a place of pilgrimage for those who continue to study the stubborn mysteries of the Maya.
