Tatiana Proskouriakoff — archaeologist (maya) with roots in the Russian Empire
Tatiana Avenirovna Proskouriakoff was born in Tomsk, Siberia, on 23 January 1909 (10 January, Old Style), the daughter of Avenir Proskouriakoff, a chemist and engineer, and Alla Nekrassova, a physician; the family encouraged her love of drawing. During the First World War her father was sent to the United States to oversee the production of munitions ordered for the Russian war effort, and the family went with him, in 1915 or 1916 by different accounts. After the Revolution they stayed, settling near Philadelphia, and Tatiana became an American.
She studied architecture at Pennsylvania State College, one of few women in the programme, and graduated in 1930 (one source says 1931), but the Depression closed off work as an architect. She volunteered at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, drawing archaeological illustrations, and in 1936 was invited by Linton Satterthwaite to join the museum's excavations at the Classic Maya site of Piedras Negras, in Guatemala, as expedition architect. Her watercolour reconstruction of the city's acropolis caught the attention of Sylvanus Morley of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which then employed her to record Maya sites; An Album of Maya Architecture (1946) and a study of Classic Maya sculpture followed.
At the time most scholars believed that the Maya inscriptions recorded little beyond the calendar, astronomy and ritual. Returning to the monuments of Piedras Negras in the late 1950s, Proskouriakoff noticed that the dates on groups of stelae fell within spans of a human lifetime and were associated with recurring glyphs that appeared to mark events in a single person's life. In 'Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras, Guatemala' (1960) she argued that the inscriptions recorded the lives of actual rulers. The paper became the turning point in the decipherment of Maya writing, and she extended the method to the inscriptions of Yaxchilan.
She never took a degree in archaeology, but held posts at the Carnegie Institution and, from 1958, at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She spent more than twenty years on a general history of the Maya, published after her death as Maya History.
She died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 30 August 1985, aged seventy-six. In 1998 part of her ashes was buried at Piedras Negras, in the acropolis whose reconstruction had begun her career.
"Came to the United States with her family in 1915 or 1916, when her father, a chemist, was sent to oversee munitions production for Russia's war effort; the family stayed after the Revolution."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Tomsk, Tomsk Governorate (Russia)
Born in Tomsk, Siberia, in 1909 to Avenir Proskouriakoff, a chemist and engineer, and Alla Nekrassova, a physician, she came to Philadelphia as a child when her father was sent to supervise munitions orders for the Russian government in the First World War.
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Tomsk, Tomsk Governorate (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.