María Rostworowski

María Rostworowski died on Sunday 6 March 2016, aged 100, between 3:30 and 3:38 in the afternoon.

In 1979 she became a member of the National Academy of History (Academia Nacional de Historia), and she later became the vice president. Additionally, she was a member of the Royal Spanish Academy of History (Real Academia de la Historia) and the National Argentine Academy of History (Academia Nacional de la Historia). She belonged to the Raúl Porras Barrenechea Institute in Lima and to the Institute of Andean Studies in Berkeley, California. The Geographic Society of Lima (La Sociedad Geográfica de Lima) accepted her as an honorary member. She presided over the Peruvian Association of Ethnic History (Asociación Peruana de Etnohistoria), which was founded in Lima in 1979 by Fernando Silva Santisteban. In order to continue her research projects, she received the support of the Wenner-Gren foundation, Ford, the Guggenheim foundation, Volkswagen, Fomciencias, and Concytec.

She was also the director of the National History Museum (Museo Nacional de Historia) from 1975 to 1980. In 1969, she worked for the newspaper Correo, which at that time was directed by Roberto Ramírez del Villar. From 1973 to 1974, she worked as a researcher in the Peruvian Culture Museum (Museo de la Cultura Peruana). In 1983, she wrote what she considered her most important work: Estructuras andinas del poder: ideología religiosa y política.

Rostworowski served as vice-president of The National Academy of History (Academia Nacional de Historia), as director of National Museum of History from 1975 to 1980, and was a principal resident scholar at the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP) in Lima. She turned 100 in August 2015.

Rostworowski married her distant cousin, Count Zygmunt Broel-Plater, a member of the Polish nobility. His father was Count Edward Cezar Marian Broel-Plater and his mother was Countess Janina Tyszkiewicz-Łohojska. Rostworowski and Count Broel-Plater had one daughter, Cristina Broel-Plater Rostworowski, but later the couple divorced. She later remarried the businessman Alejandro Diez-Canseco Coronel-Zegarra, who was the son of Manuel Diez-Canseco, and relative of the Counts of Alastaya. Diez-Canseco, who would later become the General Departmental Secretary of the Popular Action political party, played a great role in fostering Rostworowski's historical interests. After the sudden death of her husband in March 1961, she moved to the leper colony of San Pablo, directed by the German Maxime Kuczynski-Godard, to work as a missionary. It took her one day to navigate through the Amazon River to arrive in the leper colony. The first government of Fernando Belaúnde Terry designated her as cultural assistant in the Peruvian embassy in Spain.

Rostworowski's contributions to historiography, especially Peruvian history, are numerous. In her first book, Pachacútec inca Yupanqui (1953), she highlights the importance of the Inca government to the construction of the Tahuantinsuyo. She also made important and acclaimed investigations into the field of precolumbian societies on the Peruvian coast, a topic which had not been widely studied until then. Other works of hers come from diverse historical topics, ranging from historical gender studies (La mujer en la época prehispánica, 1986) to precolumbian cults and their eventual Christianization (Pachacamac y el Señor de los Milagros: una trayectoria milenaria, 1992).

María Rostworowski Tovar de Diez Canseco (8 August 1915 – 6 March 2016) was a Peruvian historian known for her extensive and detailed publications on Peruvian Ancient Cultures and the Inca Empire.