Bummer. I was looking forward to the end.
NEW YORK—Archeologists working in Guatemala have found a small room amid Mayan ruins where royal scribes apparently used walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society’s intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago.
Astronomical records were key to the Mayan calendar, which has received attention recently because of doomsday warnings that it predicts the end of the world this December. Experts say the calendar makes no such prediction. The new finding provides a bit of backup: the calculations include a time span longer than 6,000 years, meaning it could extend well beyond 2012.
“Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?” said Anthony Aveni of Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., an expert on Mayan astronomy. “You could say a number that big at least suggests that time marches on.”
The walls reveal the oldest known astronomical tables from the Maya. Until now, the earliest known examples dated from about 600 years ago, though scientists knew the Maya must have been keeping records much earlier.
Aveni, along with William Saturno of Boston University and others, report the discovery in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
The room is part of a large complex of Mayan ruins in the rainforest at Xultun in northeastern Guatemala. The walls also contain portraits of a seated king and some other figures, but it’s clear those have no connection to the astronomical writings, the scientists said.
One wall contains a calendar based on phases of the moon, covering about 13 years. The researchers said they think it might have been used to keep track of which deity was overseeing the moon at particular times.
Aveni said it would allow scribes to predict the appearance of a full moon years in advance, for example. Such record-keeping was key to Mayan astrology and rituals and could have been used to advise the king on when to go to war or how good the year’s crops would be, he said.
“What you have here is astronomy driven by religion,” he said.
On an adjacent wall are numbers indicating four time spans from roughly 935 to 6,700 years. It’s not clear what they represent, but maybe the scribes were doing calculations that combined observations from important astronomical events like the movements of Mars, Venus and the moon, the researchers said.
Why bother to do that? Maybe the scribes were “geeks . . . who just got carried away with doing these kinds of computations and calculations, and probably did them far beyond the needs of ordinary society,” Aveni suggested.
Experts unconnected with the discovery said it was a significant advance.
“It’s really a wonderful surprise,” said Simon Martin, co-curator of an exhibit about the Mayan calendar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
While the results of the scribes’ work were known from carvings on monuments, “we’ve never really been able to identify a working space, or how they actually went about things,” Martin said.
The new work gives insight into that, he said, and the fact the room had a stone roof rather than thatching supports previous indications that the scribes enjoyed a high social standing.
NEW YORK—Archeologists working in Guatemala have found a small room amid Mayan ruins where royal scribes apparently used walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society’s intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago.
Astronomical records were key to the Mayan calendar, which has received attention recently because of doomsday warnings that it predicts the end of the world this December. Experts say the calendar makes no such prediction. The new finding provides a bit of backup: the calculations include a time span longer than 6,000 years, meaning it could extend well beyond 2012.
“Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to an end this year?” said Anthony Aveni of Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., an expert on Mayan astronomy. “You could say a number that big at least suggests that time marches on.”
The walls reveal the oldest known astronomical tables from the Maya. Until now, the earliest known examples dated from about 600 years ago, though scientists knew the Maya must have been keeping records much earlier.
Aveni, along with William Saturno of Boston University and others, report the discovery in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
The room is part of a large complex of Mayan ruins in the rainforest at Xultun in northeastern Guatemala. The walls also contain portraits of a seated king and some other figures, but it’s clear those have no connection to the astronomical writings, the scientists said.
One wall contains a calendar based on phases of the moon, covering about 13 years. The researchers said they think it might have been used to keep track of which deity was overseeing the moon at particular times.
Aveni said it would allow scribes to predict the appearance of a full moon years in advance, for example. Such record-keeping was key to Mayan astrology and rituals and could have been used to advise the king on when to go to war or how good the year’s crops would be, he said.
“What you have here is astronomy driven by religion,” he said.
On an adjacent wall are numbers indicating four time spans from roughly 935 to 6,700 years. It’s not clear what they represent, but maybe the scribes were doing calculations that combined observations from important astronomical events like the movements of Mars, Venus and the moon, the researchers said.
Why bother to do that? Maybe the scribes were “geeks . . . who just got carried away with doing these kinds of computations and calculations, and probably did them far beyond the needs of ordinary society,” Aveni suggested.
Experts unconnected with the discovery said it was a significant advance.
“It’s really a wonderful surprise,” said Simon Martin, co-curator of an exhibit about the Mayan calendar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
While the results of the scribes’ work were known from carvings on monuments, “we’ve never really been able to identify a working space, or how they actually went about things,” Martin said.
The new work gives insight into that, he said, and the fact the room had a stone roof rather than thatching supports previous indications that the scribes enjoyed a high social standing.
