Unprecedented Maya Mural Found, Contradicts 2012 "Doomsday" Myth - 0 views
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last known largely unexcavated Maya megacity, archaeologists have uncovered the only known mural adorning an ancient Maya house
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still vibrant scene of a king and his retinue
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walls are rife with calculations that helped ancient scribes track vast amounts of time
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markings suggest dates thousands of years in the future
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Perhaps most important, the otherwise humble chamber offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Maya society
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in today's Xultún
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just 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) of jungle floor—it's a wonder Saturno's team found the artwork at all
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At the Guatemalan site in 2010 the Boston University archaeologist and Ph.D. student Franco Rossi were inspecting a looters' tunnel, where an undergraduate student had noticed the faintest traces of paint on a thin stucco wall.
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began cleaning off 1,200-year-old mud and suddenly a little more red paint appeared.
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What the team found, after a full excavation in 2011, is likely the ancient workroom of a Maya scribe, a record-keeper of Xultún.
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this was a workspace. People were seated on this bench" painting books that have long since disintegrated
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The books would have been filled with elaborate calculations intended to predict the city's fortunes. The numbers on the wall were "fixed tabulations that they can then refer to—tables more or less like those in the back of your chemistry book," he added.
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Undoubtedly this type of room exists at every Maya site in the Late Classic [period] and probably earlier, but it's our only example thus far."
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Maya civilization spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region. Around A.D. 900 the Classic Maya centers, including Xultún, collapsed after a series of droughts and perhaps political conflicts
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The apparent desperation of those final years may have played out on the walls of the newly revealed room—the only major excavation so far in Xultún.
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Despite past looting, the interior of the newfound room is nearly perfectly preserved.
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Among the artworks on the three intact walls is a detailed orange painting of a man wearing white disks on his head and chest—likely the scribe himself
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the researchers noticed several barely visible hieroglyphic texts, painted and etched along the east and north walls of the room
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One is a lunar table, and the other is a "ring number"—something previously known only from much later Maya books, where it was used as part of a backward calculation in establishing a base date for planetary cycles
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Nearby is a sequence of numbered intervals corresponding to key calendrical and planetary cycles.
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The calculations include dates some 7,000 years in the future
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The Maya at Xultún were likely less concerned with the end of the world than the end of their world
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Sadly, we may never understand the full context of the workroom. Many of the glyphs are badly faded. Worse, the entire city of Xultún was looted clean during the 70s, leaving very little other writing or antiquities.
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Because of this, and despite Xultún's obvious prominence in the Maya world, many archaeologists had written off the