Tatiana Proskouriakoff, a self-taught scholar, was born in Tomsk, Siberia on January 23, 1909. Tatiana’s father found that he was unable to enlist in the military, after the entry of Russia into World War I, due to a weak heart . So instead, he accepted a job as an inspector of ordnance and soon was sent on a mission out of the country to supervise the manufacturing of arms for his homeland. In 1915, the Proskouriakoff family boarded a ship for the United States called the Archangel. But, shortly after they left, they were closed in by ice. While on their journey, both Tatiana and her sister contracted scarlet fever and diphtheria and had to be carried back across the ice. They were eventually reunited with their parents in Pennsylvania in 1916. It was in Pennsylvania that they took up official residence.
Tatiana attended Lansdowne High School and received her
Bachelor of Science degree in architecture from Pennsylvania State University
in 1930. After she graduated, she spent a few years job hunting and worked at
Wanamaker’s store for a period of time to make ends meet. Though it was
difficult for her to find good work during the Depression, she was eventually
hired at the University Museum and worked for a man named Linton Satterthwaite, who was extremely impressed with her work. Her job at the museum was
to copy drawings on a scale small enough for needlepoint.
In 1936, she was asked to join an expedition to Piedras Negras, where it was her
task to sketch archaeological reconstructions of sites at Chiche’n-Itza,
Tikal, and Yaxchilan. While
there, Tatiana began to notice a sequence of dates and signs in the hieroglyphic
transcriptions. She identified a series of seven rulers in a time span of 200
years. She was also able to prove that these texts showed rites of passage and
major accomplishments of the rulers. Her studies of the stelae
of Piedras Negras influenced
the way archaeologists today incorporate glyphic data to reach interpretive
results.
In 1962, she was awarded the Alfred V. Kidder Medal for her discovery of the recording of history by the Mayans. She was named Penn State’s Woman of the Year in 1971, and Tatiana was also given honorary degrees from Tulane University and Pennsylvania State University. In 1984, she received the highest honor given to a foreigner by the people of Guatemala, the Order of the Quetzal.
Tatiana wrote several works from 1944-1974 including: An Inscription on a Jade Probably Carved at Piedras Negras, An Album of Mayan Architecture, Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala, Jades from the Cenote of Sacrifice, and Maya History. The latter was her last major work, which consumed a large portion of her time and was an exceptionally difficult study. The histories and relations of the large sites and the inscriptions of the small sites had to be meticulously calculated, as well as having to copy hieroglyphic passages onto working sheets.
Tatiana was described by her friends and family as a free-spirited, independent person, extremely intelligent, and very systematic and laborious in her analysis of the Mayan monuments. By the time she passed away on August 30, 1985, Tatiana was an Honorary Curator of Mayan Art at the Peabody Museum, as well as an epigrapher, ethnologist, and an archaeologist.
References
Celebration of Women Anthropologists,
http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/women/tatiana/tp.htm,
(2006)
Graham, Ian. "Obituary of Tatiana Proskouriakoff:" American Antiquity, 55 6-11, 1990
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