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From her earliest years in Siberia , Tania was nurtured and encouraged by her parents — one a chemist, the other a physician — who discovered she could read fluently by the age of three. She demonstrated a talent for drawing and received lessons in art and watercolor. She later used these skills in the engineering school of Pennsylvania State University where she studied for a degree in architecture. In 1936, while sketching at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, she came to the attention of Linton Satterthwaite, director of a major Maya archaeological project. He appreciated the detail and delicacy of her drawings and enlisted her to join his next expedition to Piedras Negras along the Usumacinta River on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. This marked the beginning of her life long passion for the ancient Maya.
In 1940, Tania joined Sylvanus Morley and his wife in Mexico to work at the ruins of Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and Kabah. Morley, an archaeologist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, had conceived of a project for which he felt Tania was particularly well suited. He believed that a publication of drawings, which would reconstruct the majestic architecture of important Maya archaeological sites, would build world-wide interest in the region. He was correct. Tania’s completed work, An Album of Maya Architecture, first published in 1946, is still in print today.
She went on to make significant contributions in this field, at times facing self-doubt and sacrificing personal happiness to her career. In 1962, she received the Alfred Vincent Kidder Award for Eminence in the Field of American Archaeology, in part for her article, “Historical Implications of a Pattern of Dates at Piedras Negras , Guatemala ,” published in American Antiquity in 1960. In this, she put forth her historical hypothesis that glyphic inscriptions found on Maya stone monuments dealt with key events in the lives of specific rulers by identifying glyphs for birth and accession. This article pointed the way for scholars’ breathtaking break-throughs that have since occurred in deciphering Maya texts. In 1998, Tania’s ashes were buried by a group of international archaeologists in a touching ceremony at the site that marked the beginning and the pinnacle of her career – Piedras Negras.
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llenging long established views of this ancient civilization. Over the
course of her fifty-year career, Tania’s field work, research, and publications
eventually earned the respect of her colleagues and the highest accolades given
in her profession. 