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Maya leader Gomez urged the Tourism Institute to rethink the doomsday celebration, which he criticized as a "show" that was disrespectful to Mayan culture.

Oxlajuj Ajpop is holding events it considers sacred in five cities to mark the event and Gomez said the Culture Ministry would be wise to throw its support behind their real celebrations

The Mayan calendar has

18 months of 20 days each plus a sacred month, "Wayeb," of five days

B'aktun" is the larget unit in the time cycle system, and is about 400 years

broader era spans 13 B'aktun, or about 5,200 years.

markings suggest dates thousands of years in the future

Perhaps most important, the otherwise humble chamber offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of Maya society

in today's Xultún

just 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) of jungle floor—it's a wonder Saturno's team found the artwork at all

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.

began cleaning off 1,200-year-old mud and suddenly a little more red paint appeared.

What the team found, after a full excavation in 2011, is likely the ancient workroom of a Maya scribe, a record-keeper of Xultún.

this was a workspace. People were seated on this bench" painting books that have long since disintegrated

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.

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."

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

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.

Despite past looting, the interior of the newfound room is nearly perfectly preserved.

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

the researchers noticed several barely visible hieroglyphic texts, painted and etched along the east and north walls of the room

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

Nearby is a sequence of numbered intervals corresponding to key calendrical and planetary cycles.

The calculations include dates some 7,000 years in the future

The Maya at Xultún were likely less concerned with the end of the world than the end of their world

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.

Because of this, and despite Xultún's obvious prominence in the Maya world, many archaeologists had written off the

supported by a series of grants from the National Geographic Society, 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.

Maya glyphs near his face call him “Younger Brother Obsidian,” a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. Based on other Maya sites, Saturno theorizes he could be the son or younger brother of the king and possibly the artist-scribe who lived in the house. “The portrait of the king implies a relationship between whoever lived in this space and the royal family,” Saturno said.

Paint doesn't preserve well in the rain forest climate of Guatemala, and Saturno figured that the faint red and black lines his student had found weren't going to yield much information

The discovery was "certainly nothing to write home about

felt he had a responsibility to excavate the room the looters had tried to reach, if only to be able to report the size of the structure along with the paint finding.

shocked to run into a brilliantly painted portrait: a Mayan king, sitting on his throne, wearing a red crown with blue feathers flowing out behind him.

Another figure peeks out from behind him

On an adjoining wall, three loincloth-clad figures sit, wearing feathered headdresses

ext to the king, a man painted in brilliant orange wearing jade bracelets reaches out with a stylus, likely identifying him as a scribe. He is labeled as "Younger Brother Obsidian," or perhaps "Junior Obsidian

small, 6-foot-by-6-foot room

calendar seemed to have been added after the murals were completed

almost as if an ancient scribe got sick of flipping through a document to find his timekeeping chart and decided to put it on the wall for at-a-glance reference

captioned "Older Brother Obsidian," or "Senior Obsidian,"

calendar also appears to note the cycles of Mars and Venus,

Most likely

the wall calendar and the Dresden Codex both arose from earlier books that long ago rotted away

The murals only survived, because, instead of collapsing the room, Mayan engineers filled it with rubble and then built on top of it.

This is clearly a space where someone important was living, this important household of the noble class, and here you also have a mathematician working in that space," Stuart said. "It's a great illustration of how closely those roles were connected in Mayan society

Unfortunately, the name of the king pictured in the mural room has been lost.

Xultun was first discovered in 1915, less than 0.1 percent has been explored

Looters damaged much of the ancient city in the 1970s

much of historical significance has been lost. But archaeologists still don't even know how far the boundaries of the town extend.