![]() Saturno and his team launched an organized exploration and excavation of the house, working urgently to beat the region’s rainy seasons, which threatened to erase what time had so far preserved. Then, supported by a series of grants from the National Geographic Society, Dr. ![]() Saturno’s student Max Chamberlain, who was following looters’ trenches to explore the site of Xultún, hidden in the remote rain forest of the Petén. The vegetation-covered structure was first spotted in 2010 by Dr. “It’s the kind of thing that only appears in one place – the Dresden Codex, which the Maya wrote many centuries later. David Stuart, Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas-Austin, who deciphered the glyphs. “There are tiny glyphs all over the wall, bars and dots representing columns of numbers,” said Dr. The discovery represents the first Maya art to be found on the walls of a house. Although they all involve common multiples of key calendrical and astronomical cycles, the exact significance of these particular spans of time is not known (William Saturno / David Stuart, © National Geographic) These are the first calculations Maya archaeologists have found that seem to tabulate all of these cycles in this way. “The car gets a step closer to the junkyard as the numbers turn over, the Maya just start over.”įour 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 stretch some 7,000 years into the future. Anthony Aveni, professor of astronomy and anthropology at Colgate University, a co-author of the paper in Science. “It’s like the odometer of a car, with the Maya calendar rolling over from the 120,000s to 130,000,” said Dr. The archaeologists said that despite popular belief, there is no sign that the Maya calendar – or the world – was to end in the year 2012, just one of its calendar cycles. The discovery appears in the June issue of National Geographic magazine and in the May 11 issue of the journal Science. They seem to be using it like a blackboard.” “It’s like an episode of TV’s ‘Big Bang Theory,’ a geek math problem and they’re painting it on the wall. ![]() “For the first time we get to see what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community,” Saturno added. ![]() Some appear to represent the various calendrical cycles charted by the Maya – the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars.” William Saturno, an archaeologist at Boston University, who led the exploration and excavation, said to National Geographic: “One wall of the structure, thought to be a house, is covered with tiny, millimeter-thick, red and black glyphs unlike any seen before at other Maya sites. Three figures sit in this composite photograph of the interior of the discovered Mayan house: the black portrait, left, is one of three nearly identical seated men - two are not shown at center is what's thought to be the scribe, holding a paintbrush at right is a Maya king, bedecked in blue feathers (Tyrone Turner, © National Geographic)ĭr.
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