Tatiana Proskouriakoff
1909-1985

Proskouriakoff noticed in the   hieroglyphic 
transcriptions of Piedras Negras  a pattern of dates and hieroglyphic signs.   Through her analysis of these patterns she was able to identify a sequence of seven rulers for a span of almost two hundred years.  She also showed that these texts indicated rites of passage and major feats of these rulers.   She opened the way for a new approach to the Maya. Today, archaeological projects incorporate glyphic data to help formulate interpretive results, influenced by  her studies of the stelae of Piedras Negras.
 
 

Arch Detail, Palace of the Governor
(Uxmal)

Links of Interest:

*Map

*Mesoamerica

*Temple of the Frescoes

*Peabody Ethnographic Collection

*Information on Maya Architecture

Selected Works by Tatiana Proskouriakoff:

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.

1960a  Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala.   American Antiquity 25 (4): 454-75.
 
 

   She was born on January 23, 1909, in Tomsk, Siberia, Russia to a chemist father and a physician mother.   Tatiana and her older sister were brought to the United States in 1916, where they were raised and educated in Pennsylvania.  In 1930 she received her Bachelor of Science from Pennsylvania State University in architecture.

    Tatiana Proskouriakoff found it difficult to obtain work as an architect during the Depression.  She answered an advertisement for an architecture student and begin working for Linton Satterthwaite at the University Museum.  She joined the Museum's 1936 expedition to Piedras Negras where her work   included drawings of archaeological reconstructions of sites at Chiche'n-Itza, Tikal, Yaxchilan, and others.
 
 

Hieroglyphic Stairway
(A.P. Maudslay)

    For her discovery that ancient Mayans were recording their history, Proskouriakoff was awarded the Alfred V. Kidder Medal in 1962 (designed by her in 1950).  In 1971 she was named Penn State's Woman of the Year.  She was given honorary degrees from Tulane University and Pennsylvania State University 1970's, and in 1984 she received the Order of the Quetzal, the highest honor awarded to a foreigner  by Guatemala.

  Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Honorary Curator, Maya Art, Peabody Museum, was an epigrapher, ethnologist, and   archaeologist.  We celebrate another women anthropologist who has given her talents and contributed richly to the body of knowledge of Classic Mayan studies.

"...Tatiana, a major illustrator of archaeological publication, meticulously done in detail in field-absolute authority on Mayan architecture.  She was no lecturer, but one-to-one she could tell all about Mayan architecture."   Whiteford, 1999.
 
 

Sources

Ian Graham
1985   Anthropology Newsletter/November

Elin C. Danien and Robert J. Sharer
1992  New theories on the Ancient Maya.  The University of Pennsylvania.

Andrew Hunter Whiteford, Ph.D.
1999  Interview with Catherine Klein.