Tyrone Turner / National Geographic
Boston
University archaeologist William Saturno carefully uncovers art and
writings left by the Maya some 1,200 years ago. The art and other
symbols on the walls may have been records kept by a scribe, Saturno
theorizes. Saturno's excavation and documentation of the house were
supported by the National Geographic Society.
By Alan Boyle
Archaeologists have found a
stunning
array of 1,200-year-old Maya paintings in a room that appears to have
been a workshop for calendar scribes and priests, with numerical
markings on the wall that denote intervals of time well beyond the
controversial cycle that runs out this December.
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."
Tyrone Turner / National Geographic
The
painted figure of a man — possibly a scribe who once lived in the house
built by the ancient Maya — is illuminated through a doorway to the
dwelling, in northeastern Guatemala. The structure represents the first
Maya house found to contain artwork on its walls. The research is
supported by the National Geographic Society.
Tyrone Turner / National Geographic
Never-before-seen
artwork — the first to be found on walls of a Maya house — adorn the
dwelling in the ruined city of Xultún. The figure at left is one of
three men on the house's west wall who are painted in black and wear
identical costumes. One of the black figures is named "Older Brother
Obsidian." The figure at right appears to be a scribe, labeled "Younger
Brother Obsidian."
Heather Hurst / National Geographic
A
vibrant orange figure, kneeling in front of the king on the ruined
house's north wall, is labeled "Younger Brother Obsidian," a curious
title seldom seen in Maya text. The man is holding a writing instrument,
which may indicate he was a scribe. The painting re-creates the design
and colors of the figure in the original Maya mural.
Heather Hurst / National Geographic
Three
male figures, seated and painted in black, appear in a painting that
re-creates the design and colors of a Mural found on the ruined house's
west wall. The men wear only white loincloths and medallions around
their necks, plus a headdress bearing another medallion and a single
feather. One of the figures is particularly burly and is labeled "Older
Brother Obsidian." Another is labeled as a youth.
Heather Hurst / National Geographic
A
Maya king, seated and wearing an elaborate headdress of blue feathers,
adorns the north wall of the ruined house discovered at the Maya site of
Xultun. An attendant, at right, leans out from behind the king's
headdress. The painting by artist Heather Hurst re-creates the design
and colors of the original Maya artwork at the site.
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."
William Saturno and David Stuart / National Geographic
Four
long numbers on the north wall of the ruined house relate to the Maya
calendar and computations about the moon, sun and possibly Venus and
Mars; the dates may stretch some 7,000 years into the future. These are
the first calculations Maya archaeologists have found that seem to
tabulate all of these cycles in this way. Although they all involve
common multiples of key calendrical and astronomical cycles, the exact
significance of these spans of time is not known.
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."
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