Treasure Seekers: Code of the Maya Kings Page #3

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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.

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