Washington, May 11 (ANI): Archaeologists in Guatemala have reported the striking discovery of a small building, whose walls exhibit not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that obliterate any notion that the Mayans envisaged the end of the world in 2012.
These deep-time calendars can be used to count thousands of years into the past and future, countering pop-culture and New Age ideas that Mayan calendars ended on Dec. 21, 2012, (or Dec. 23, depending on who's counting), thus predicting the end of the world.
The newly found calendars, which track the motion of the moon, Venus and Mars, provide an unprecedented glimpse into how these storied sky-gazers - who dominated Central America for nearly 1,000 years - kept such accurate track of months, seasons and years, Washington Post reported.
"What they're trying to do is understand the large cycles of cosmic time," said William Saturno, the Boston University archaeologist who led the expedition.
"This is the space they're doing it in. It's like looking into da Vinci's workshop."
Before the new discovery, the best-preserved Mayan calendars were inscribed in bark-paged books dubbed codices, the most popular being the Dresden Codex. But those pages hail from several hundred years later than the recently found calendars.
Saturno asserted that researchers have long assumed that the Mayans had worked out the cycles of the moons and planets much earlier, but no proof of such work had ever been found.
But in 2010, an undergraduate student working with Saturno, Max Chamberlain, stumbled onto the house as the team started excavating at a Mayan city, Xultun, which, despite being known since 1915, had never been professionally excavated.
For decades, looters had dug deep trenches to access buildings. One day at lunch, Chamberlain declared his intention to find paintings by crawling through the trenches.
Saturno scoffed. The buildings were too shallow - any paint on their walls would surely be long gone, erased by water, dirt, insects and encroaching tree roots.
But sure enough, Chamberlain stumbled onto a wall, open to a trench, showing two red lines.
A quick excavation revealed the back wall of the building - replete with a mural of a resplendent Mayan king, in bright blue, adorned with feathers and jewellery.
Saturno's team brushed off the wall and "ta-da!" he said.
"A Technicolor, fantastically preserved mural. I don't know how it survived."
The mural is the first Mayan painting found in a small building instead of a large public space. And it's also the oldest known preserved Mayan painting.
Next to the king, a scribe holds a writing instrument. Three inexplicable figures wearing black also march across the wall. One of them is named "older brother obsidian."
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AFP Relax – Sat, May 19, 2012 12:24 AM SGT
