National Geographic: Treasure Seekers - Code of the Maya Kings (1999) Movie Script
Code of Maya Kings
They would tantalize explorers
for hundreds of years,
ruined cities lost in the jungles
of Central America and Mexico.
Inscrutable faces etched in stone.
Mysterious writing.
Who had left these messages
from the past?
It would take more than a century to
unlock the secrets of the ancient Maya.
Two extraordinary people
would lead the way.
Separated by 100 years,
they would unveil one of the greatest
mysteries of archeology.
Code of Maya Kings
Chichen Itza, Mexico 1842.
An American lawyer named
John Lloyd Stephens
wanders the empty ruins
looking for clues.
He knows what he wants to find.
It has kept him going
through two harrowing journeys,
exploring the desolate jungles
of Central America.
Kept him pushing on
through mud and malaria,
poisonous snakes, and insect-plagued
nights under the stars.
Stephens, the lawyer,
was looking for proof,
undeniable evidence that these ruins
were not built by the Egyptians
or the Phoenicians or the Lost Tribes
of Israel.
And here at Chichen Itza he thinks
that he's found it at least.
Writing unlike that of
any other civilization he knows.
The same writing he'd seen at other
ruined cities hundreds of miles away.
Proof of an ancient empire
of Native Americans
more sophisticated than anyone
believed possible.
Stephens himself was a product of
the New World.
He was born in 1805, the son of
a wealthy New York merchant.
The city wasn't much more than
a Dutch village,
but it was the hub of a new nation.
Stephens grew up
along the Hudson River
watching the ships come in
from around the world.
After reading law,
he opened a practice on Wall Street.
Soon he got into politics,
campaigning vigorously for
Andrew Jackson for President.
But months of shouting to the crowds
gave him a serious throat infection.
His doctor prescribed a common remedy
for wealthy young men-
a grand tour of Europe.
The ancient ruins of Italy and Greece
only piqued his curiosity.
Stephens went on to Egypt,
and spent three months
floating up the Nile,
visiting the temples and monuments
along the way.
Only a decade before a Frenchman
had deciphered the hieroglyphs,
revealing the rich history
of Egypt's kings and queens.
Stephens was fascinated,
and he still wasn't ready to go home.
He'd seen pictures of
a fantastic ancient city in Arabia,
lost for century to all
but the Bedouins.
Everyone told him the journey was too
perilous for an unaccompanied American,
so Stephens disguised himself
as a Turkish merchant
and took the name Abul Hassis.
In 1836, John Lloyd Stephens
was the first American to set eyes
on the ruins of Petra.
In Roman times it had been one of
the greatest cities of the East.
Stephens still found it dazzling:
"A temple delicate and limpid,
carved like a cameo
from a solid mountain wall,
the first view
of that superb facade
must produce an effect
which will never pass away."
Stephens letters home
were so vivid and imaginative,
they were published
in a monthly magazine.
Soon, he was writing books recounting
his exotic adventures around the world.
The lawyer had become
a literary sensation.
He was a seasoned observer,
he was an incredible observer.
In fact, Herman Melville
of Moby Dick fame, recalled one time
when he was in church,
Herman Melville was, he was a kid.
He heard that Stephens
was in the front row.
And when Stephens left,
Melville writes,
"I thought this man must have great
huge eyes that bulged through his head,
he was such a good observer,"
because Melville had read his stuff.
Back in New York the life
of a sedentary lawyer
no longer held any charm for Stephens.
Instead, his mind was filled with
thoughts of another journey,
not so far away, but even more
remote and daring.
On his way home through London,
he met an artist named
Rederick Catherwood
who'd spent ten
years in the Near East.
They shared their interest
in exotic travel.
Sensing a kindred spirit, Catherwood
had showed him a curious book
about a lost city in Central America
hidden in the jungle.
The book's authors thought
the fabulous ruins of Palenque
had been built by Egyptians,
Carthaginians, maybe even
the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Anyone but the Native Americans.
There was sort of a racism in here
that said that
everything great had come
through the Greeks, the Egyptians,
through the European tradition.
And anything different
appeared relatively
to be a bunch of naked savages
wandering through the woods.
In 1839, no one believed
the Native Americans
capable of building
a sophisticated civilization.
Stephens' own government
had little use for them.
Only a year earlier
they had uprooted thousands of Indians,
sending them westward
along the infamous Trail of Tears.
The thought of a great ancient
civilization in Central America
seemed even more preposterous.
A few travelers had reported
sighting ruined cities like Palenque,
but Stephens could find
none of them on the map.
It was a travel writer's dream,
but only this time
he would have to bring back
evidence of whatever he found.
But who better to accompany him
than the artist Frederick Catherwood,
now practicing architecture
in New York?
Only one small problem remained,
the newly formed
Central American Federation
was fighting a bitter civil war.
Using his political connections,
Stephens secured a post
as a Confidential Agent.
He figured his diplomatic coat would
protect him in dangerous territory.
So in October 1839,
Catherwood bid farewell to
his wife and two young boys,
and now they were here,
deep in the jungles of Central America.
The ruins of Copan was
their first goals.
But when they found
the little village of the same name,
no one there had ever head
of nearby ruins.
Finally, a knowledgeable Indian
offered to guide them.
But that was hours ago.
Now they were beginning to think that
the ruins were nothing but a legend.
When suddenly, there they were,
grander than their wildest dreams,
the Ruins of Copan.
Pyramids rose majestically
out of the jungle.
Great stone faces peered at them
from intricately carved monuments,
twice the size of a man.
Stephens noticed hieroglyphs
and judged them
to be as fine
as any he'd seen in Egypt,
yet his experience told him
that these carvings were unique.
The silence of the once
majestic city overwhelmed him:
Copan lay before us like a shattered
bark in the midst of the ocean,
her masts gone, her crew perished,
and none to tell whence she came.
I think the description of Copan
is the single most poetic description
of a place he visits,
for it is though he is walking
around inside the Titanic,
and he's looking at the shipwreck
of a civilization.
He walks from monument to monument.
It is through he's looking into
the faces of those
who have recently been
ruling this place:
America, say historians,
was peopled by savages.
But savages never reared
these structures,
savages never carved these stones,
architecture, sculpture and painting,
all the arts which embellish life,
had flourished
in this overgrown forest,
and yet none knew that
such things had been,
or could tell of
their past existence.
He's the first who is
really able to say,
Look at these stone figures;
these must be portraits of
their kings and queens.
And he uses the word queen
which is really quite astonishing,
in seeing men and women in the
monuments, for 100 years later,
all the men and women that Stephens
saw will have been reduced
by 20th century archeologists to
a group of anonymous calendar priests.
Stephens has this kind of Yankee
can-do observation.
The best part of many of
Stephens' insights is that
they prove to be absolutely true.
Yet Stephens was deeply puzzled
by the mystery at the heart of Copan.
Who could have built
this extraordinary city?
The local Indians didn't seem to know.
Stephens needed their help
to explore the ruins,
but the owner of the land interfered.
Finally, it seemed that the only
solution was to buy Copan.
So the lawyer put on
his diplomatic coat,
and went to the village to negotiate.
You are perhaps curious to know
how old ruins sell in Central America.
I paid $50 for Copan.
There was never any difficulty
about price.
I offered that sum, for which
Don Jose Maria thought me only a fool.
If I had offered more,
he would probably have considered me
something worse.
Ownership settled, the team set about
surveying the ruined city,
measuring and mapping its buildings.
Catherwood is a remarkable
character as well.
I wish we knew more about him.
One gains some sense of the
Stephens personality,
just from the written word.
The Catherwood personality
doesn't emerge much.
Stephens treats him very formally,
and he appears as Mr. Catherwood.
At first Mr. Catherwood found it
almost impossible to draw the monuments.
Their tropical luxuriance defied
his restrained British hand.
Stephens mentions coming upon him
in the woods one day.
Catherwood is standing in front of
a big upright monument.
It is a statute of one of the Copan
rulers, and all intricately carved.
Catherwood's standing there almost
obscured by a pile of crumpled paper,
which represents the output so far
that day of unsuccessful attempts
to draw this thing.
Fortunately, Catherwood had
brought along a camera lucida a box
with a prism inside which allowed him
to trace a reflected image.
To please the perfectionist
Mr. Catherwood,
every detail had to be correct.
With the coming of Spring,
they were ready to begin
the search for the next great goal,
Palenque.
The territory to the north,
through the Sierra Madras Mountains,
was wild and uncharted.
As one local said, the road to
Palenque were only for birds.
Snakes and clouds of mosquitoes
dogged their steps.
To Stephens the worst part was
the local custom of carry a visitor up
the steepest trail on a chair,
strapped to the back of an Indian.
I rose and fell with every breath,
felt his body trembling under me,
and his knees seemed giving way.
The slightest irregular movement on my
part may bring us both down together.
I would have given him a release
for the rest of the journey
to be off his back.
On and on they traveled.
It took more than a month
to reach the fabled ruins
that had first inspired their journey.
Palenque seemed to hang on
the edge of the mountains.
It's graceful buildings dominating
the plain below.
Wherever we moved,
we saw the evidence of their tastes,
their skills in arts,
their wealth and power.
In the midst of desolation and ruin,
we looked back to the past,
cleared away the gloomy forest
and fancied every building perfect,
lofty and imposing.
Palenque's architecture
was different from Copan's,
but Stephens noticed many similarities,
particularly the mysterious writings.
Examining it carefully,
he reached a remarkable conclusion:
There is room for the belief that
the whole of this country
was once occupied by the same race,
speaking the same language,
or at least having the same
written characters.
The Indians Stephens met
spoke many languages
and were as mystified
by the ruins as he was.
Yet, intuitively, Stephens seemed
to sense a link between them.
Stephens, I think, is the first person
who can make the connection
between the Indians that he sees
and meets and the ancient ruins.
Whereas other people want to say,
oh, these pathetic peasants,
these miserable Indians,
they could never have built this.
We must look for some
alternative solution
to where these things
would have come from.
He believes that here
is complete continuity.
And that, I think, is one of the most
radical ideas to come out of his book.
At night, Stephens and Catherwood
slept in the imposing ruin
they called The Palace.
The rainy season had begun,
and the mosquitoes,
venomous during the day,
were even worse at night.
Catherwood was already
racked with malaria,
but somehow they kept on working,
for 22 days and sleepless nights,
bewitched by the beauty of Palenque.
Exhausted, they pushed on,
further north and east to the Yucatan,
but Catherwood was too ill
to continue.
Vowing to return,
they headed home to New York.
In 10 months the two explorers
had accomplished the impossible.
They had rediscovered an ancient
American civilization grander
than anyone had ever dreamed.
Now they were ready to
astound the world with its story.
Stephens's books was incredible popular
when it appeared in the summer of 1841,
Incidents of Travel
in Central America,
Chiapas, and Yucatan.
Harper and Brothers had printed up
a goodly print run,
and it sold out pretty quickly.
Stephens writes a real page-turner.
It is such a personal view,
and it becomes one of the great
bestsellers of the entire 19th century.
It goes through dozens of editions.
And there is an enormous American
desire to know more about
this part of the world.
They were lionized
after the publication.
They were quite the thing
in New York.
It was reviewed everywhere.
Just an amazing publication epic,
so the trip was a success
and they planned to go again.
Seventeen month after they'd left Mexico,
Stephens and Catherwood
were back in the Yucatan,
exploring the city of Uxmal.
On this second journey,
they concentrated their efforts
on this one region of Mexico.
Inching their way through the jungle,
they discovered many ruined cities
entirely unknown, with names
like Coba, Labna, and Sayil.
Stephens felt they were
racing against time.
Everywhere they went, they found
ruins collapsing into piles of rubble.
Catherwood even learned how to sketch
from his mule to save time.
At Uxmal, the artist drew the face of
a god on the side of a pyramid.
Years later, it was destroyed.
Catherwood's illustration is
our only record of it.
They performed the greatest service,
perhaps, in freezing in time
a set of observations
and images of a land that
no longer exists.
They're romantic pictures,
yet at the same time
they're remarkably accurate.
Many of Catherwood's renderings,
for examples, of the Maya at Uxmal
and Magna and other sites
are the first depictions
that we have of what Mayan people
looked like.
We had no earlier record.
In the town of Balankanche,
the explorers visited
an ancient well deep underground.
Catherwood was so inspired,
he began his memorable sketch
at the foot of the ladder.
It was the wildest setting
that could be conceived,
men struggling up a huge ladder
with earthen jars of water
strapped to back and head,
their sweating bodies glistening
under the light of the pine torches.
One of the last places they explored
was Chichen Itza.
Its architecture moved them more than
any other city on this second journey.
Most exciting of all was the revelation
that this city had been linked
to Copan and Palenque hundred
of miles away.
It was the first time in Yucatan
that we had found hieroglyphics
sculptured on stone
which beyond all question
bore the same type
with those at Copan and Palenque.
If one but could read it.
Finally, Stephens felt he had the
proof he'd been looking for.
The mysterious writing was unique,
unlike any he'd ever seen.
Now he could convince the skeptics
that the ruined cities had been built
by Native Americans.
These ruins are different than the
works of any other known people.
Of a new order, they stand alone.
In the nine months
of their second journey,
Stephens and Catherwood managed
to visit 44 ruined cities.
And gather some treasures for
an exhibit on their return.
But they paid a heavy price
for their adventures.
Malaria would haunt both men
for the rest of their lives.
John Lloyd Stephens would fight
the dread disease for ten years
before succumbing to it in 1852.
Frederick Catherwood
would die tragically
a few years later in a shipwreck.
This is the only image we have of him.
For there was another sad chapter
to their story.
The fate of the great exhibition
they held on their return to New York.
This fire started one night
in July of 1842,
and literally overnight it wiped out
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.
She chose a profession
that was dominated by men at a time
when many women did not
choose to go that route.
Tanya majored in architecture
at Pennsylvania State University,
one of the only women to do so
in her graduating class.
It was 1930, the height of
the Great Depression.
Tanya spent several dispiriting years
looking for work,
then settled for a job making drawings
for a needlepoint shop.
The search for good subjects led her
to the Archeological Museum
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tanya's skillful drawings attracted
the attention of Linton Satterwaite,
an archeologist looking for
an artist to work at his dig,
deep in the jungles of Guatemala.
The ruined City of Peidras Negras
was a big jump
from her close-knit Russian family,
but Tanya was ready for an adventure.
The small party set off for Guatemala
in the winter of 1936.
On their way,
they stopped at Palenque,
the graceful ruined city
that had captivated
the explorers Stephens
and Catherwood almost 100 years before.
Tanya was equally entranced.
She, in older years, said that
when she first saw the elegant
little Temple of the Sun,
she knew she had found her vocation,
that there would never be anything else
that would get her as much as that.
Tanya's pencil responded easily
to the intricacies of Maya art.
The young Russian American had felt
the pulse of an ancient mystery.
But settling in the Peidras Negras
wasn't easy.
Tanya had to learn how to survey
and draw the dilapidated ruins.
As an outsider, as a woman
who had learned a profession
and trying to find a way into it,
I'm sure she was clearly little Tanya,
allowed to sit there
with her drafting pen
and make observations
about Peidras Negras.
I think she had to pay for
every step she took, but she really,
I think, was someone who was able to
compete effectively with the boys.
In Mayan archeology in the 1932s,
'the boys' were
a pretty formidable bunch.
This was a group of people
that came together,
people from mostly Ivy League,
Harvard and Penn and other places.
They were all great friends.
They were all, as most archeologists
were at the time,
people of independent means.
They could do what
they darn well pleased.
Even in the bush these silver-spoon
archeologists managed to live well.
At Peidras Negras,
dinner was a formal occasion,
beginning with cocktails.
Somewhere around 5 o'clock
they would dress,
and they would dress elegantly.
Tanya had a white dress,
full-length dress,
that she packed along with her.
She would slough through the mud
to get to the dining hut,
and then sort of tuck the muddy bottom
of her dress down behind her feet,
so that no one would notice.
There was a little bit of challenging
banter also between Tanya and Linton.
He had suggested that
one of the structures
did not have a staircase
going up one side,
and she felt strong that
there would have been
and challenged him on that point.
So he said, well,
if you really believe that
there was a staircase there,
then you have to dig and find me
the proof, which she did.
And to her delight,
she found the staircase.
Tanya began to sketch reconstructions
of the ruins
based on the archeological data.
Her drawings were so impressive,
they earned her a sketching tour
of other Maya cities.
Her first stop was Copan.
Noted Mayanist Ian Graham shared
an office with Tanya in her later years
at Harvard's Peabody Museum.
He remembers her tails of Copan
in the thirties.
Anyway, she landed,
the sole female in this isolated camp.
There were some fairly
spirited characters there.
One was an amazing man
called Gus Stromsvik.
Gustav Stromsvik,
the Norwegian archeologist
who worked for the
Carnegie Institution,
fell deeply in love with her.
And Tanya had a period
in which she tried to decide
what this relationship
was going to mean in her life.
Stromsvik was
a very dynamic personality.
He was very outgoing.
He was a raconteur, and she loved
people who could tell good stories,
she loved to laugh.
So she was drawn to him.
But on the other hand, Stromsvik had
a very serious drinking problem.
Particularly on Saturday nights,
the life there was spent pretty wild.
Tanya seemed to handle it
perfectly well.
It's amazing.
She led such a protective life
in her Russian family
and in her suburban life
in Philadelphia.
But she had grit.
Tanya's next stop was Chichen Itza,
center of the Mayan world
in this golden age of archeology.
The ancient city
was undergoing a renaissance,
as archeologists from
the Carnegie Institution
pieced it back together.
Half of rebuilding has gone
hand in hand with the work of
Welcoming the throngs
of visitors was the man
who would serve
as the spokesman for the Maya
for more than 20 years,
Carnegie's Sylvanus Morley,
known for his oversized straw hats
and ebullient personality.
At Chichen Itza,
he lived in grand style
in a Spanish colonial manor house.
Every evening a Chinese cook
would prepare dinner for Morely
and his band of archeologists.
Envious colleagues referred to them
as the club.
On special evenings Morley
would lead his guests to the ruins
of the Maya ball court for a concert,
amplified by the court's
amazing acoustics.
Tanya would join the others
in the moonlight in this fitting place
to conjure the spirits
of the departed Maya.
For to the Carnegie Club, the Maya
were a band of priestly stargazers,
unlike any other people
who had ever lived.
These ancient wise men
had never fought wars.
Instead, they had spent their time
inventing an elaborate calendar
and a system of writing used
for nothing but recording time.
The author of this view of the Maya
was Sir Eric Thompson,
an acerbic Englishman
whose intellect dominated Maya studies
for nearly 50 years.
No one, not even Morely
questioned his authority.
As Thompson began to
formulate his ideas,
no one had the strength
of character to resist.
Morely was the one who tried.
In Morely's early works
he offers a rather different picture.
He is overwhelmed by Thompson's
point of view and adopts it.
This makes it very difficult
for a new voice to find a path,
and particularly when one can imagine
that the name of Tanya
is probably generally preceded
by little.
Thompson may have been able to cow
the other members of the Carnegie Club,
but he hadn't bargained
on Tanya Proskouriakoff.
My general sense of her is absolutely
contrary in a kind of way that if you said,
well, it looks like rain,
she would say,
ah, there's not a drop of
rain in that cloud.
She was the kind of person
if you said,
Oh, it's too warm in here,
she would immediately go turn up
the thermostat
and make it a little warmer.
She just had a kind of
contrary personality.
I think that helped her also then say,
well, if you say the Maya are peaceful,
let's look at them
from another point of view.
Bit by bit, Tanya began to ask
different questions than her colleagues.
She also started to study
the living Maya,
convinced that they had something
to teach her as well.
When she was in highlands Chiapas,
she took some lessons learning
how to weave on the hand loom
that the Maya work with.
At the same time, the same young woman
was helping her to learn Maya.
This is something a lot of people
don't know about Tanya is that
she did study Yucatex Maya.
Tanya's intuition that the living Maya
could provide the valuable link
to the past was borne out by
a fabulous discovery in 1946.
An American filmmaker named
Giles Healey persuaded a Maya Indian
to show him one of their secret place.
The Indian lead Healy to Bonampak,
a lost city buried in the jungle.
Peering into a building,
Healy was astounded to find faces
looking back at him from the walls.
Armies were locked in a furious battle.
Other scenes showed prisoners of war
and victims of human sacrifice.
Try as Thompson might, it was
impossible to convince anyone, I think,
that these depicted a peaceful Maya,
for in the Bonampak murals
we see one of the greatest
battle paintings
ever created in the history
of humankind.
Proskouriakoff had not been allowed
to write a single interpretive word
on the Bonampak paintings,
but I've always wondered if it did not
play some role
in shaping how she looked at
the Maya world.
Sir Eric Thompson effectively
barred the door at Bonampak,
preventing other Mayanists from
pursuing the bloody implications
of its murals.
Nevertheless, the flaws
were beginning to show
in his vision of the peaceful Maya.
A few years later, another piece of
the puzzle would slide into place.
In a bookstore in Mexico,
Tanya found a revolutionary new book
by a Russian named Yuri Knorozov.
Always interested in things Russian,
she avidly read his new theory
of Maya writing.
Eventually, it would prove the key
to deciphering the glyphs.
But for years Sir Eric Thompson
would condemn the new theory
as Communist propaganda.
In the late 1950s, Carnegie closed down
its Mezo-America program,
a victim of new priorities.
But Tanya was kept on as a research
associate with an office
at Harvard's Peabody Museum.
Her days in the field were over,
but her greatest work had just begun.
In her little apartment in Cambridge,
Tanya was on to something.
When reading through Tanya's diaries,
I can see that in the 1950s
she made a very conscious decision
to become more private in her life.
She began working much more
intensively with the hieroglyphics.
In her mind Tanya had returned
to Peidras Negras,
the site of her first experience
with the Maya.
Puzzling over the monuments,
she noticed a peculiar pattern
with the glyphs.
Over and over, the same glyphs
were linked to dates
and on each of the monuments none
of the dates exceeded a human lifespan.
Suddenly to Tanya the evidence
was clear:
the monuments were marking the stages
of an individual's life.
Where others had seen
only cold calculations,
Tanya Proskouriakoff saw the lives
of human beings.
It was a conclusion that cut
to the heart of everything
Sir Eric Thompson believed.
Tanya marshaled her facts,
then showed Thompson her article
before sending it to the publisher.
And when she talked with him
before he had read it,
he disagreed strongly with
what her ideas of the Maya were.
When he took the article home
and he read it,
he came back the next day and said,
well, actually,
I believe you're right
which were very big words
from someone who was considered
a giant in the field at the time.
And from that time on,
when you saw a Maya monument
you knew that it didn't deal with
gods and priests,
it deal with human beings,
and that was the importance.
In one sense, everything
that we've done since then in hieroglyphy
and in the interpretation
of the hieroglyphs
has been a footnote to what Tanya did.
She did the general breakthrough.
When she and Yuri Knorozov in Russia
came up with through
hieroglyphic keys, that was it.
We went on a roll.
Once the code breakers went to work,
a more human image of the Maya
began to emerge.
Written in the monuments
were the stories of their lives,
their ancestors,
their battles and conquests.
Across the centuries the Maya
came alive,
kings and queens,
rulers of fabulous cities
full of the voices of the people
echoing out of the past.
Things were changing at
such a dramatic rate.
We can read about, I would guess,
that the Maya wrote.
Given that in 1960 we could barely
read any of it, that's extraordinary.
David Stuart began deciphering Maya
glyphs when he was just a boy.
Tanya Proskouriakoff is
one of his heroes.
He met her shortly before she died,
when she was continuing her careful
scholarship at the Peabody.
In 1998, Stewart took her ashes
to Peidras Negras
for burial at a sight high
above the ancient city she had loved.
We didn't realize how poignant
the ceremony was going to be.
Most of us were students
or young people in the field,
in our 30s at the oldest.
And it sort of dawned
on everyone that here
was the remains of this great lioness,
this legendary figure.
The Guatemalans who were
there were very emotional about this
because this was the woman who had
brought the Maya back to history.
At the end of his pioneering journey
to Central America in 1840,
the explorer, John Lloyd Stephens
had been the first to state
with conviction:
One thing I believe, that its history
is graven on its monuments.
More than 100 years later, we finally
knew that Stephens was right.
At Palenque, Copan, Chichen Itza,
and dozens of ruins in between,
the ancient Maya now speak for themselves.
They would tantalize explorers
for hundreds of years,
ruined cities lost in the jungles
of Central America and Mexico.
Inscrutable faces etched in stone.
Mysterious writing.
Who had left these messages
from the past?
It would take more than a century to
unlock the secrets of the ancient Maya.
Two extraordinary people
would lead the way.
Separated by 100 years,
they would unveil one of the greatest
mysteries of archeology.
Code of Maya Kings
Chichen Itza, Mexico 1842.
An American lawyer named
John Lloyd Stephens
wanders the empty ruins
looking for clues.
He knows what he wants to find.
It has kept him going
through two harrowing journeys,
exploring the desolate jungles
of Central America.
Kept him pushing on
through mud and malaria,
poisonous snakes, and insect-plagued
nights under the stars.
Stephens, the lawyer,
was looking for proof,
undeniable evidence that these ruins
were not built by the Egyptians
or the Phoenicians or the Lost Tribes
of Israel.
And here at Chichen Itza he thinks
that he's found it at least.
Writing unlike that of
any other civilization he knows.
The same writing he'd seen at other
ruined cities hundreds of miles away.
Proof of an ancient empire
of Native Americans
more sophisticated than anyone
believed possible.
Stephens himself was a product of
the New World.
He was born in 1805, the son of
a wealthy New York merchant.
The city wasn't much more than
a Dutch village,
but it was the hub of a new nation.
Stephens grew up
along the Hudson River
watching the ships come in
from around the world.
After reading law,
he opened a practice on Wall Street.
Soon he got into politics,
campaigning vigorously for
Andrew Jackson for President.
But months of shouting to the crowds
gave him a serious throat infection.
His doctor prescribed a common remedy
for wealthy young men-
a grand tour of Europe.
The ancient ruins of Italy and Greece
only piqued his curiosity.
Stephens went on to Egypt,
and spent three months
floating up the Nile,
visiting the temples and monuments
along the way.
Only a decade before a Frenchman
had deciphered the hieroglyphs,
revealing the rich history
of Egypt's kings and queens.
Stephens was fascinated,
and he still wasn't ready to go home.
He'd seen pictures of
a fantastic ancient city in Arabia,
lost for century to all
but the Bedouins.
Everyone told him the journey was too
perilous for an unaccompanied American,
so Stephens disguised himself
as a Turkish merchant
and took the name Abul Hassis.
In 1836, John Lloyd Stephens
was the first American to set eyes
on the ruins of Petra.
In Roman times it had been one of
the greatest cities of the East.
Stephens still found it dazzling:
"A temple delicate and limpid,
carved like a cameo
from a solid mountain wall,
the first view
of that superb facade
must produce an effect
which will never pass away."
Stephens letters home
were so vivid and imaginative,
they were published
in a monthly magazine.
Soon, he was writing books recounting
his exotic adventures around the world.
The lawyer had become
a literary sensation.
He was a seasoned observer,
he was an incredible observer.
In fact, Herman Melville
of Moby Dick fame, recalled one time
when he was in church,
Herman Melville was, he was a kid.
He heard that Stephens
was in the front row.
And when Stephens left,
Melville writes,
"I thought this man must have great
huge eyes that bulged through his head,
he was such a good observer,"
because Melville had read his stuff.
Back in New York the life
of a sedentary lawyer
no longer held any charm for Stephens.
Instead, his mind was filled with
thoughts of another journey,
not so far away, but even more
remote and daring.
On his way home through London,
he met an artist named
Rederick Catherwood
who'd spent ten
years in the Near East.
They shared their interest
in exotic travel.
Sensing a kindred spirit, Catherwood
had showed him a curious book
about a lost city in Central America
hidden in the jungle.
The book's authors thought
the fabulous ruins of Palenque
had been built by Egyptians,
Carthaginians, maybe even
the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Anyone but the Native Americans.
There was sort of a racism in here
that said that
everything great had come
through the Greeks, the Egyptians,
through the European tradition.
And anything different
appeared relatively
to be a bunch of naked savages
wandering through the woods.
In 1839, no one believed
the Native Americans
capable of building
a sophisticated civilization.
Stephens' own government
had little use for them.
Only a year earlier
they had uprooted thousands of Indians,
sending them westward
along the infamous Trail of Tears.
The thought of a great ancient
civilization in Central America
seemed even more preposterous.
A few travelers had reported
sighting ruined cities like Palenque,
but Stephens could find
none of them on the map.
It was a travel writer's dream,
but only this time
he would have to bring back
evidence of whatever he found.
But who better to accompany him
than the artist Frederick Catherwood,
now practicing architecture
in New York?
Only one small problem remained,
the newly formed
Central American Federation
was fighting a bitter civil war.
Using his political connections,
Stephens secured a post
as a Confidential Agent.
He figured his diplomatic coat would
protect him in dangerous territory.
So in October 1839,
Catherwood bid farewell to
his wife and two young boys,
and now they were here,
deep in the jungles of Central America.
The ruins of Copan was
their first goals.
But when they found
the little village of the same name,
no one there had ever head
of nearby ruins.
Finally, a knowledgeable Indian
offered to guide them.
But that was hours ago.
Now they were beginning to think that
the ruins were nothing but a legend.
When suddenly, there they were,
grander than their wildest dreams,
the Ruins of Copan.
Pyramids rose majestically
out of the jungle.
Great stone faces peered at them
from intricately carved monuments,
twice the size of a man.
Stephens noticed hieroglyphs
and judged them
to be as fine
as any he'd seen in Egypt,
yet his experience told him
that these carvings were unique.
The silence of the once
majestic city overwhelmed him:
Copan lay before us like a shattered
bark in the midst of the ocean,
her masts gone, her crew perished,
and none to tell whence she came.
I think the description of Copan
is the single most poetic description
of a place he visits,
for it is though he is walking
around inside the Titanic,
and he's looking at the shipwreck
of a civilization.
He walks from monument to monument.
It is through he's looking into
the faces of those
who have recently been
ruling this place:
America, say historians,
was peopled by savages.
But savages never reared
these structures,
savages never carved these stones,
architecture, sculpture and painting,
all the arts which embellish life,
had flourished
in this overgrown forest,
and yet none knew that
such things had been,
or could tell of
their past existence.
He's the first who is
really able to say,
Look at these stone figures;
these must be portraits of
their kings and queens.
And he uses the word queen
which is really quite astonishing,
in seeing men and women in the
monuments, for 100 years later,
all the men and women that Stephens
saw will have been reduced
by 20th century archeologists to
a group of anonymous calendar priests.
Stephens has this kind of Yankee
can-do observation.
The best part of many of
Stephens' insights is that
they prove to be absolutely true.
Yet Stephens was deeply puzzled
by the mystery at the heart of Copan.
Who could have built
this extraordinary city?
The local Indians didn't seem to know.
Stephens needed their help
to explore the ruins,
but the owner of the land interfered.
Finally, it seemed that the only
solution was to buy Copan.
So the lawyer put on
his diplomatic coat,
and went to the village to negotiate.
You are perhaps curious to know
how old ruins sell in Central America.
I paid $50 for Copan.
There was never any difficulty
about price.
I offered that sum, for which
Don Jose Maria thought me only a fool.
If I had offered more,
he would probably have considered me
something worse.
Ownership settled, the team set about
surveying the ruined city,
measuring and mapping its buildings.
Catherwood is a remarkable
character as well.
I wish we knew more about him.
One gains some sense of the
Stephens personality,
just from the written word.
The Catherwood personality
doesn't emerge much.
Stephens treats him very formally,
and he appears as Mr. Catherwood.
At first Mr. Catherwood found it
almost impossible to draw the monuments.
Their tropical luxuriance defied
his restrained British hand.
Stephens mentions coming upon him
in the woods one day.
Catherwood is standing in front of
a big upright monument.
It is a statute of one of the Copan
rulers, and all intricately carved.
Catherwood's standing there almost
obscured by a pile of crumpled paper,
which represents the output so far
that day of unsuccessful attempts
to draw this thing.
Fortunately, Catherwood had
brought along a camera lucida a box
with a prism inside which allowed him
to trace a reflected image.
To please the perfectionist
Mr. Catherwood,
every detail had to be correct.
With the coming of Spring,
they were ready to begin
the search for the next great goal,
Palenque.
The territory to the north,
through the Sierra Madras Mountains,
was wild and uncharted.
As one local said, the road to
Palenque were only for birds.
Snakes and clouds of mosquitoes
dogged their steps.
To Stephens the worst part was
the local custom of carry a visitor up
the steepest trail on a chair,
strapped to the back of an Indian.
I rose and fell with every breath,
felt his body trembling under me,
and his knees seemed giving way.
The slightest irregular movement on my
part may bring us both down together.
I would have given him a release
for the rest of the journey
to be off his back.
On and on they traveled.
It took more than a month
to reach the fabled ruins
that had first inspired their journey.
Palenque seemed to hang on
the edge of the mountains.
It's graceful buildings dominating
the plain below.
Wherever we moved,
we saw the evidence of their tastes,
their skills in arts,
their wealth and power.
In the midst of desolation and ruin,
we looked back to the past,
cleared away the gloomy forest
and fancied every building perfect,
lofty and imposing.
Palenque's architecture
was different from Copan's,
but Stephens noticed many similarities,
particularly the mysterious writings.
Examining it carefully,
he reached a remarkable conclusion:
There is room for the belief that
the whole of this country
was once occupied by the same race,
speaking the same language,
or at least having the same
written characters.
The Indians Stephens met
spoke many languages
and were as mystified
by the ruins as he was.
Yet, intuitively, Stephens seemed
to sense a link between them.
Stephens, I think, is the first person
who can make the connection
between the Indians that he sees
and meets and the ancient ruins.
Whereas other people want to say,
oh, these pathetic peasants,
these miserable Indians,
they could never have built this.
We must look for some
alternative solution
to where these things
would have come from.
He believes that here
is complete continuity.
And that, I think, is one of the most
radical ideas to come out of his book.
At night, Stephens and Catherwood
slept in the imposing ruin
they called The Palace.
The rainy season had begun,
and the mosquitoes,
venomous during the day,
were even worse at night.
Catherwood was already
racked with malaria,
but somehow they kept on working,
for 22 days and sleepless nights,
bewitched by the beauty of Palenque.
Exhausted, they pushed on,
further north and east to the Yucatan,
but Catherwood was too ill
to continue.
Vowing to return,
they headed home to New York.
In 10 months the two explorers
had accomplished the impossible.
They had rediscovered an ancient
American civilization grander
than anyone had ever dreamed.
Now they were ready to
astound the world with its story.
Stephens's books was incredible popular
when it appeared in the summer of 1841,
Incidents of Travel
in Central America,
Chiapas, and Yucatan.
Harper and Brothers had printed up
a goodly print run,
and it sold out pretty quickly.
Stephens writes a real page-turner.
It is such a personal view,
and it becomes one of the great
bestsellers of the entire 19th century.
It goes through dozens of editions.
And there is an enormous American
desire to know more about
this part of the world.
They were lionized
after the publication.
They were quite the thing
in New York.
It was reviewed everywhere.
Just an amazing publication epic,
so the trip was a success
and they planned to go again.
Seventeen month after they'd left Mexico,
Stephens and Catherwood
were back in the Yucatan,
exploring the city of Uxmal.
On this second journey,
they concentrated their efforts
on this one region of Mexico.
Inching their way through the jungle,
they discovered many ruined cities
entirely unknown, with names
like Coba, Labna, and Sayil.
Stephens felt they were
racing against time.
Everywhere they went, they found
ruins collapsing into piles of rubble.
Catherwood even learned how to sketch
from his mule to save time.
At Uxmal, the artist drew the face of
a god on the side of a pyramid.
Years later, it was destroyed.
Catherwood's illustration is
our only record of it.
They performed the greatest service,
perhaps, in freezing in time
a set of observations
and images of a land that
no longer exists.
They're romantic pictures,
yet at the same time
they're remarkably accurate.
Many of Catherwood's renderings,
for examples, of the Maya at Uxmal
and Magna and other sites
are the first depictions
that we have of what Mayan people
looked like.
We had no earlier record.
In the town of Balankanche,
the explorers visited
an ancient well deep underground.
Catherwood was so inspired,
he began his memorable sketch
at the foot of the ladder.
It was the wildest setting
that could be conceived,
men struggling up a huge ladder
with earthen jars of water
strapped to back and head,
their sweating bodies glistening
under the light of the pine torches.
One of the last places they explored
was Chichen Itza.
Its architecture moved them more than
any other city on this second journey.
Most exciting of all was the revelation
that this city had been linked
to Copan and Palenque hundred
of miles away.
It was the first time in Yucatan
that we had found hieroglyphics
sculptured on stone
which beyond all question
bore the same type
with those at Copan and Palenque.
If one but could read it.
Finally, Stephens felt he had the
proof he'd been looking for.
The mysterious writing was unique,
unlike any he'd ever seen.
Now he could convince the skeptics
that the ruined cities had been built
by Native Americans.
These ruins are different than the
works of any other known people.
Of a new order, they stand alone.
In the nine months
of their second journey,
Stephens and Catherwood managed
to visit 44 ruined cities.
And gather some treasures for
an exhibit on their return.
But they paid a heavy price
for their adventures.
Malaria would haunt both men
for the rest of their lives.
John Lloyd Stephens would fight
the dread disease for ten years
before succumbing to it in 1852.
Frederick Catherwood
would die tragically
a few years later in a shipwreck.
This is the only image we have of him.
For there was another sad chapter
to their story.
The fate of the great exhibition
they held on their return to New York.
This fire started one night
in July of 1842,
and literally overnight it wiped out
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.
She chose a profession
that was dominated by men at a time
when many women did not
choose to go that route.
Tanya majored in architecture
at Pennsylvania State University,
one of the only women to do so
in her graduating class.
It was 1930, the height of
the Great Depression.
Tanya spent several dispiriting years
looking for work,
then settled for a job making drawings
for a needlepoint shop.
The search for good subjects led her
to the Archeological Museum
at the University of Pennsylvania.
Tanya's skillful drawings attracted
the attention of Linton Satterwaite,
an archeologist looking for
an artist to work at his dig,
deep in the jungles of Guatemala.
The ruined City of Peidras Negras
was a big jump
from her close-knit Russian family,
but Tanya was ready for an adventure.
The small party set off for Guatemala
in the winter of 1936.
On their way,
they stopped at Palenque,
the graceful ruined city
that had captivated
the explorers Stephens
and Catherwood almost 100 years before.
Tanya was equally entranced.
She, in older years, said that
when she first saw the elegant
little Temple of the Sun,
she knew she had found her vocation,
that there would never be anything else
that would get her as much as that.
Tanya's pencil responded easily
to the intricacies of Maya art.
The young Russian American had felt
the pulse of an ancient mystery.
But settling in the Peidras Negras
wasn't easy.
Tanya had to learn how to survey
and draw the dilapidated ruins.
As an outsider, as a woman
who had learned a profession
and trying to find a way into it,
I'm sure she was clearly little Tanya,
allowed to sit there
with her drafting pen
and make observations
about Peidras Negras.
I think she had to pay for
every step she took, but she really,
I think, was someone who was able to
compete effectively with the boys.
In Mayan archeology in the 1932s,
'the boys' were
a pretty formidable bunch.
This was a group of people
that came together,
people from mostly Ivy League,
Harvard and Penn and other places.
They were all great friends.
They were all, as most archeologists
were at the time,
people of independent means.
They could do what
they darn well pleased.
Even in the bush these silver-spoon
archeologists managed to live well.
At Peidras Negras,
dinner was a formal occasion,
beginning with cocktails.
Somewhere around 5 o'clock
they would dress,
and they would dress elegantly.
Tanya had a white dress,
full-length dress,
that she packed along with her.
She would slough through the mud
to get to the dining hut,
and then sort of tuck the muddy bottom
of her dress down behind her feet,
so that no one would notice.
There was a little bit of challenging
banter also between Tanya and Linton.
He had suggested that
one of the structures
did not have a staircase
going up one side,
and she felt strong that
there would have been
and challenged him on that point.
So he said, well,
if you really believe that
there was a staircase there,
then you have to dig and find me
the proof, which she did.
And to her delight,
she found the staircase.
Tanya began to sketch reconstructions
of the ruins
based on the archeological data.
Her drawings were so impressive,
they earned her a sketching tour
of other Maya cities.
Her first stop was Copan.
Noted Mayanist Ian Graham shared
an office with Tanya in her later years
at Harvard's Peabody Museum.
He remembers her tails of Copan
in the thirties.
Anyway, she landed,
the sole female in this isolated camp.
There were some fairly
spirited characters there.
One was an amazing man
called Gus Stromsvik.
Gustav Stromsvik,
the Norwegian archeologist
who worked for the
Carnegie Institution,
fell deeply in love with her.
And Tanya had a period
in which she tried to decide
what this relationship
was going to mean in her life.
Stromsvik was
a very dynamic personality.
He was very outgoing.
He was a raconteur, and she loved
people who could tell good stories,
she loved to laugh.
So she was drawn to him.
But on the other hand, Stromsvik had
a very serious drinking problem.
Particularly on Saturday nights,
the life there was spent pretty wild.
Tanya seemed to handle it
perfectly well.
It's amazing.
She led such a protective life
in her Russian family
and in her suburban life
in Philadelphia.
But she had grit.
Tanya's next stop was Chichen Itza,
center of the Mayan world
in this golden age of archeology.
The ancient city
was undergoing a renaissance,
as archeologists from
the Carnegie Institution
pieced it back together.
Half of rebuilding has gone
hand in hand with the work of
Welcoming the throngs
of visitors was the man
who would serve
as the spokesman for the Maya
for more than 20 years,
Carnegie's Sylvanus Morley,
known for his oversized straw hats
and ebullient personality.
At Chichen Itza,
he lived in grand style
in a Spanish colonial manor house.
Every evening a Chinese cook
would prepare dinner for Morely
and his band of archeologists.
Envious colleagues referred to them
as the club.
On special evenings Morley
would lead his guests to the ruins
of the Maya ball court for a concert,
amplified by the court's
amazing acoustics.
Tanya would join the others
in the moonlight in this fitting place
to conjure the spirits
of the departed Maya.
For to the Carnegie Club, the Maya
were a band of priestly stargazers,
unlike any other people
who had ever lived.
These ancient wise men
had never fought wars.
Instead, they had spent their time
inventing an elaborate calendar
and a system of writing used
for nothing but recording time.
The author of this view of the Maya
was Sir Eric Thompson,
an acerbic Englishman
whose intellect dominated Maya studies
for nearly 50 years.
No one, not even Morely
questioned his authority.
As Thompson began to
formulate his ideas,
no one had the strength
of character to resist.
Morely was the one who tried.
In Morely's early works
he offers a rather different picture.
He is overwhelmed by Thompson's
point of view and adopts it.
This makes it very difficult
for a new voice to find a path,
and particularly when one can imagine
that the name of Tanya
is probably generally preceded
by little.
Thompson may have been able to cow
the other members of the Carnegie Club,
but he hadn't bargained
on Tanya Proskouriakoff.
My general sense of her is absolutely
contrary in a kind of way that if you said,
well, it looks like rain,
she would say,
ah, there's not a drop of
rain in that cloud.
She was the kind of person
if you said,
Oh, it's too warm in here,
she would immediately go turn up
the thermostat
and make it a little warmer.
She just had a kind of
contrary personality.
I think that helped her also then say,
well, if you say the Maya are peaceful,
let's look at them
from another point of view.
Bit by bit, Tanya began to ask
different questions than her colleagues.
She also started to study
the living Maya,
convinced that they had something
to teach her as well.
When she was in highlands Chiapas,
she took some lessons learning
how to weave on the hand loom
that the Maya work with.
At the same time, the same young woman
was helping her to learn Maya.
This is something a lot of people
don't know about Tanya is that
she did study Yucatex Maya.
Tanya's intuition that the living Maya
could provide the valuable link
to the past was borne out by
a fabulous discovery in 1946.
An American filmmaker named
Giles Healey persuaded a Maya Indian
to show him one of their secret place.
The Indian lead Healy to Bonampak,
a lost city buried in the jungle.
Peering into a building,
Healy was astounded to find faces
looking back at him from the walls.
Armies were locked in a furious battle.
Other scenes showed prisoners of war
and victims of human sacrifice.
Try as Thompson might, it was
impossible to convince anyone, I think,
that these depicted a peaceful Maya,
for in the Bonampak murals
we see one of the greatest
battle paintings
ever created in the history
of humankind.
Proskouriakoff had not been allowed
to write a single interpretive word
on the Bonampak paintings,
but I've always wondered if it did not
play some role
in shaping how she looked at
the Maya world.
Sir Eric Thompson effectively
barred the door at Bonampak,
preventing other Mayanists from
pursuing the bloody implications
of its murals.
Nevertheless, the flaws
were beginning to show
in his vision of the peaceful Maya.
A few years later, another piece of
the puzzle would slide into place.
In a bookstore in Mexico,
Tanya found a revolutionary new book
by a Russian named Yuri Knorozov.
Always interested in things Russian,
she avidly read his new theory
of Maya writing.
Eventually, it would prove the key
to deciphering the glyphs.
But for years Sir Eric Thompson
would condemn the new theory
as Communist propaganda.
In the late 1950s, Carnegie closed down
its Mezo-America program,
a victim of new priorities.
But Tanya was kept on as a research
associate with an office
at Harvard's Peabody Museum.
Her days in the field were over,
but her greatest work had just begun.
In her little apartment in Cambridge,
Tanya was on to something.
When reading through Tanya's diaries,
I can see that in the 1950s
she made a very conscious decision
to become more private in her life.
She began working much more
intensively with the hieroglyphics.
In her mind Tanya had returned
to Peidras Negras,
the site of her first experience
with the Maya.
Puzzling over the monuments,
she noticed a peculiar pattern
with the glyphs.
Over and over, the same glyphs
were linked to dates
and on each of the monuments none
of the dates exceeded a human lifespan.
Suddenly to Tanya the evidence
was clear:
the monuments were marking the stages
of an individual's life.
Where others had seen
only cold calculations,
Tanya Proskouriakoff saw the lives
of human beings.
It was a conclusion that cut
to the heart of everything
Sir Eric Thompson believed.
Tanya marshaled her facts,
then showed Thompson her article
before sending it to the publisher.
And when she talked with him
before he had read it,
he disagreed strongly with
what her ideas of the Maya were.
When he took the article home
and he read it,
he came back the next day and said,
well, actually,
I believe you're right
which were very big words
from someone who was considered
a giant in the field at the time.
And from that time on,
when you saw a Maya monument
you knew that it didn't deal with
gods and priests,
it deal with human beings,
and that was the importance.
In one sense, everything
that we've done since then in hieroglyphy
and in the interpretation
of the hieroglyphs
has been a footnote to what Tanya did.
She did the general breakthrough.
When she and Yuri Knorozov in Russia
came up with through
hieroglyphic keys, that was it.
We went on a roll.
Once the code breakers went to work,
a more human image of the Maya
began to emerge.
Written in the monuments
were the stories of their lives,
their ancestors,
their battles and conquests.
Across the centuries the Maya
came alive,
kings and queens,
rulers of fabulous cities
full of the voices of the people
echoing out of the past.
Things were changing at
such a dramatic rate.
We can read about, I would guess,
that the Maya wrote.
Given that in 1960 we could barely
read any of it, that's extraordinary.
David Stuart began deciphering Maya
glyphs when he was just a boy.
Tanya Proskouriakoff is
one of his heroes.
He met her shortly before she died,
when she was continuing her careful
scholarship at the Peabody.
In 1998, Stewart took her ashes
to Peidras Negras
for burial at a sight high
above the ancient city she had loved.
We didn't realize how poignant
the ceremony was going to be.
Most of us were students
or young people in the field,
in our 30s at the oldest.
And it sort of dawned
on everyone that here
was the remains of this great lioness,
this legendary figure.
The Guatemalans who were
there were very emotional about this
because this was the woman who had
brought the Maya back to history.
At the end of his pioneering journey
to Central America in 1840,
the explorer, John Lloyd Stephens
had been the first to state
with conviction:
One thing I believe, that its history
is graven on its monuments.
More than 100 years later, we finally
knew that Stephens was right.
At Palenque, Copan, Chichen Itza,
and dozens of ruins in between,
the ancient Maya now speak for themselves.