Treasure Seekers: Code of the Maya Kings Page #4

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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.

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