The ancient Mayans were masters of time, keepers of good calendars. And now we have one of their timekeepers' workrooms to prove it.
In a striking find, archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building whose walls display not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that destroy any notion that the Mayans predicted 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), thereby 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.
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"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 find, the best-preserved Mayan calendars were inscribed in bark-paged books called codices, the most famous being the Dresden Codex. But those pages hail from several hundred years later than the newly found calendars.
Saturno said researchers have long assumed the Mayans had worked out the cycles of the moons and planets much earlier, but until now no evidence of such work had ever been found.
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 - perhaps the worker who scribbled the calendars on the wall - holds a writing instrument.
Three mysterious figures wearing black also march across the wall. Mayan experts have no idea whom these mysterious figures might represent.
One calendar spans some 7,000 years - heading much further into the future than the supposed doomsday date.
"Like a lot of ancient cultures, they were able with naked-eye astronomy to calculate the paths of the planets," said David Stuart, one of the world's foremost experts in Mayan hieroglyphics.
