Is this the whole story?
National Geographic: Unprecedented Maya Mural Found, Contradicts 2012 “Doomsday” Myth
Erik Vance in Xultún, Guatemala
for National Geographic News
Updated 5:28 p.m. ET, May 10, 2012In the last known largely unexcavated Maya megacity, archaeologists have uncovered the only known mural adorning an ancient Maya house, a new study says—and it’s not just any mural.
In addition to a still vibrant scene of a king and his retinue, the walls are rife with calculations that helped ancient scribes track vast amounts of time. Contrary to the idea the Maya predicted the end of the world in 2012, the 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. (Video: “Mysterious Maya Calendar & Mural Uncovered.”)
“The paintings we have here—we’ve never found them anyplace else,” excavation leader William Saturno told National Geographic News.
And in today’s Xultún—to the untrained eye, 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.
The pair began cleaning off 1,200-year-old mud and suddenly a little more red paint appeared.
“Suddenly Bill was like, ‘Oh my God, we have a glyph!’” Rossi said.
(Read Saturno’s account of the Maya-mural discovery in National Geographic magazine online.)
What the team found, after a full excavation in 2011, is likely the ancient workroom of a Maya scribe, a record-keeper of Xultún.
“The reason this room’s so interesting,” said Rossi, as he crouched in the chamber late last year, “is that … 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 Twilight
Its facade long ago erased by erosion and creeping plant life, the scribe’s chamber was once part of a small building just off a massive Maya plaza circled by pyramids, where kings and high priests conducted ceremonies and peddlers likely sold the clay pots whose fragments now litter the forest site.
Discovered in 1915, the sprawling city was just five miles (eight kilometers) from another Maya metropolis, San Bartolo, which became famous when Saturno uncovered stunning, 2,000-year-old Maya murals there about a decade ago.
Beyond the two cities, the 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. (Read about the rise and fall of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)
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.
A “Different Mindset,” Etched in Ancient Stucco
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, said Saturno, who received funding from the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration and Expeditions Council. (National Geographic News is a division of the Society.)
Holding a paintbrush, the scribe is reaching out to the blue-feather-bedecked king, whose elaborate likeness was hidden behind a curtain attached to the wall by human bone, according to the study, published this week in the journal Science.
But what was really interesting was what the team found next.
Working with epigrapher David Stuart and archaeologist and artist Heather Hurst, 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, adding to evidence against the idea that the Maya thought the world would end in 2012—a modern myth inspired by an ancient calendar that depicts time starting over this year. (Related pictures: “2012 Doomsday Myths Debunked.”)
“We keep looking for endings,” expedition leader Saturno said in a statement. “The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It’s an entirely different mindset.”
Though the idea of cyclical time is nothing new in Maya studies, team member Rossi added, the Xultún mural is by far the earliest known expression of the concept.
For example, he said while pointing to the ring number, “this is something we don’t see again for over 500 years.”
[...]
Much more here.
Mysterious Maya Calendar & Mural Uncovered
Published on May 11, 2012 by NationalGeographic
May 10, 2012 — Researchers have uncovered a remarkably well-preserved Maya mural and calendar markings that add perspective on Maya thinking.
National Geographic Society grantee William Saturno and his team uncovered the artwork in what was either a home or workplace abandoned hundreds of years ago. The findings are published in the May 11 issue of the journal Science and the June edition of National Geographic magazine.
Tags: archaeology, Guatemala, Maya, Open thread
The Obamayan connection … Suddenly it makes sense!
Was Kilroy there??
Patricius wrote:
see!
it is all so clear now.
This may be my favorite cartoon of the year so far.
*pfft*
how convenient.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/11/22/union-black-friday-walmart-fail
I guess failure sometimes is an option…
flat faced Mayan chicas is an acquired taste
@ doriangrey:
Best news since the debacle of November 6th. Thanks, I needed that.
doriangrey wrote:
That piece doesn;t say if she will lose her job over this. At any rate, if she doesn’t I don’t think her co-workers, whose workload she just increased by her walkout, will welcome her back.
But I guess she didn’t think about that.
Also, it implies she’s a union member. I don’t believe any Walmart is unionized. Is that correct?
eaglesoars wrote:
That is what makes this story. There are no unions at Wal-Mart. The Unions are trying like hell to get in, but Wal-Mart has kept them out by various methods.
OK, time to take mom over to my brother’s house so my niece and nephew can have thanksgiving with grandma…
(Yes, they went on strike demanding that grandma come over to their house for thanksgiving this year)
doriangrey wrote:
My understanding is that each Wal Mart store would have to be unionized individually. If that’s true, that’s a very tall order for the unions.
Our Wal Mart opened the same day we moved here. We stopped by to get some trash bins and there were union pickets there. Absolutely nobody cared.
1389 -- Great cartoon!
As God is my witness, I thought turkeys coulc fly.
I’ll be a son of a bitch! I saw my frakkin’ EX in my hometown this afternoon before I had dinner with my mom! She was still driving her red truck! I don’t know if she saw me though.
Turns out yesterday she answered my summons.
The administration’s Middle East policy continues to run into the ground.
Egypt’s Morsi Takes Dictatorial Powers
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Morsi-Egypt-dictatorial-powers/2012/11/22/id/465109?s=al&promo_code=10DB9-1
@ 96cid:
meh. NO administration’s policy would have changed this. The Arab Spring has green shoots of totalitarianism. Obama doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that Americans were killed in Libya. But even if he did, what, at this point, could he possibly do?
I suspect he envies Morsi actually.
doriangrey wrote:
$12/hr!!! Holy crap we’d kill to get that around here. Average here is around 8 or 9.
Mars wrote:
cost of living in Florida is a bit higher than where you are tho.
@ Mars:
Or another question, which is if it sucks so much, why has she been there for 8 years?
eaglesoars wrote:
I’ve lived on less. That’s why I didn’t stay in colorado. Couldn’t even rent a place to live on what I was making with the company I worked for. And it was the most I’ve ever made.
@ Mars:
Yeah, I’m selling insurance as a licensed agent (call center) and only making $11 + a performance bonus that keeps getting tougher to make.
@ mfhorn:
I have some questions: posed purely for analytical purposes
- what kind of insurance?
- is somebody doing ‘leads’ research for you so that you’re not just doing ‘cold calls’?
@ eaglesoars:
This is life insurance. No cold calls- people have either called us or have send a request for info.