This is the famous Mayanist Tatiana Proskouriakoff. She emigrated to the U.S. as a child - a genius child - in 1915 from Russia. She studied architecture and ended up drawing what some Mayan ruins would have looked like in their glory days. She then studied the glyphs and came up with an overall structure as to what they were. Leave it to an architect to give structure to the debate. Before her, no one realized that the glyphs and stuccos depicted seven rulers/kings and covered two hundred years of history. With that determined, it was easier for others to learn to read the glyphs. She wasn't a lecturer, someone said, but one-on-one could explain it all. She devoted her life to studying Mayan history. She never married, but had 'close' relationships with a couple of her fellow Mayanists. She's very pretty in the photo - love the 40s outfit, with the linen pants. Very chic.Wikipedia has a drawing that Tatiana made of her scholarly reconstruction of the ruin at Xpuhil. It is beautiful - very ornate and complete. She depicts the three towers as being connected with one building and shows many jaguar heads, where only one now remains. Char Solomon wrote a biography of her. She quotes Tatiana as saying she "escaped personal happiness". The personal choices she made and the insecurities she experienced would make it a great choice for a bookclub.
Related posts:
She was buried at a Mayan ruin.
The latest MY2K article.
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