Treasure Seekers: Code of the Maya Kings Page #5

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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.

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