© Tyrone Turner/National GeographicBoston University archaeologist William Saturno carefully uncovers art and writings left by the Maya some 1,200 years ago.
For years, prophets of doom have been saying that we're in for an apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012, because that marks the end of the Maya "Long Count" calendar, which was based on a cycle of 13 intervals known as "baktuns," each lasting 144,000 days. But the researchers behind the latest find, detailed in the journal Science and an upcoming issue of National Geographic, say the writing on the wall runs counter to that bogus belief.
"It's very clear that the 2012 date, while important as Baktun 13, was turning the page," David Stuart, an expert on Maya hieroglyphs at the University of Texas at Austin, told reporters today. "Baktun 14 was going to be coming, and Baktun 15 and Baktun 16. ... The Maya calendar is going to keep going, and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future."
The current focus of the research project, led by Boston University's William Saturno, is a 6-by-6-foot room situated beneath a mound at the Xultun archaeological site in Guatemala's Peten region. Maxwell Chamberlain, a BU student participating in the excavations there, happened to notice a poorly preserved wall protruding from a trench that was previously dug by looters, with the hints of a painting on the plaster.
Saturno said he didn't think there'd be much to the wall, but "I felt we had a responsibility to find out at the very least how large this room was."
When archaeologists worked their way into the mound, they were amazed to find that it was a richly decorated room from the Classic Maya period, dating back to roughly the year 800. One niche was adorned with the faded picture of a Maya king, wearing a blue-feathered headdress and holding a white scepter. The picture of a scribe holding a stylus, perhaps the son or brother of the king, was painted nearby with the label "Younger Brother Obsidian." Another wall showed a row of three stylized black figures, with one bearing the hieroglyphic name "Older Brother Obsidian."
Rows of numbers and hieroglyphs were painted on yet another wall. In fact, it appeared that the wall had been plastered over repeatedly and covered with new sets of figures. "What these are giving us are time spans," Stuart said. "Not so much dates, but Maya notations of elapsed time."
Stuart said some sets of numbers denoted lunar cycles of 177 or 178 days, along with the sign for a patron god that was associated with each cycle. "This was, we think, a calculator for a Maya priest, an astronomer, to figure out lunar ages," he said.
In a news release, Saturno said this represents the first look at "what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community."
"It's like an episode of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' a geek math problem and they're painting it on the wall," Saturno said. "They seem to be using it like a blackboard."
In addition to lunar cycles, the calculations on the wall could relate to the periods of Venus, Mercury and Mars, the researchers reported. Stuart said such calculations could have come into play for predicting eclipses. He imagined that there might be "one or more, maybe two or three of these astronomers or calendar priests working, sitting there on a workbench and writing these notations on the wall."
One array of numbers would be particularly intriguing to doomsday debunkers: lists that appear to denote wide ranges of accumulated time, including a 17-baktun period. "There was a lot more to the Maya calendar than just 13 baktuns," Stuart observed. Seventeen baktuns would stand for about 6,700 years, which is much longer than the 13-baktun cycle of 5,125 years. However, Stuart cautioned that the time notation shouldn't be read as specifying a date that's farther in the future than Dec. 21.
"It may just be that this is a mathematical number that's kind of interesting," he said. "We're not sure what the base of the calendar is."
Saturno said archaeologists have been trying to get the word that the end of the Maya culture's 13-baktun "Long Count" calendar didn't signify the end of the world, but merely a turnover to the next cycle in a potentially infinite series - like going from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1 on a modern calendar, or turning the odometer on a car over from 99999.9 to 00000.0.
"If someone is a hard-core believer that the world is going to end in 2012, no painting is going to convince them otherwise," he said. "The only thing that can convince them otherwise is waiting until Dec. 22, 2012 - which fortunately for all of us isn't that far away."
Saturno and his colleagues plan to be studying the Xultun site long after that time. He said the workshop was apparently part of a residential compound that had been razed over the ages; the workshop was preserved because it was filled in with material rather than smashed down from above. That could suggest that the room was recognized as a special place even when it was abandoned. Research into the room and its purpose is continuing, Saturno said.
In its day, Xultun apparently served as one of the major ceremonial cities for the Classic Maya civilization - and yet it's just barely been explored, in part because the area is so remote.
"We have probably 99.9 percent of Xultun left to explore," Saturno said. "We're going to be working on it probably for many decades to come. ... Four or five years in to the research project, we have yet to determine its actual boundaries - so my estimate may be off. We may have 99.99 percent left to excavate."
coincidence strikes again.in no way am i saying a group of scientists are wrong,but its pretty funny how they find this information in the 'last' year.since the paintings are layered i wonder what is under them.i also wonder how they could possibly look without damaging the top layers.we live in an interesting time.