http://www.smh.com.au/world/on-closer-inspection-doomsday-cancelled-20120511-1yi2l.html
On closer inspection, doomsday cancelled Brian Vastag May 12, 2012 a.. New archeological finding dipsels the notion that Mayans believed 2012 would be the end of the world. Photo: Reuters THE ancient Mayans were masters of time, keepers of good calendars. And now we have one of their timekeepers' workrooms to prove it. Archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building where walls display 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 December 21, 2012, (or December 23, depending on who's counting), thereby predicting the end of the world. Advertisement: Story continues below The calendars, which track the motion of the moon, Venus and Mars, provide an unprecedented glimpse into how these sky-gazers - who dominated Central America for nearly 1000 years - kept such accurate track of months, seasons and years. ''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 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. Researchers long assumed the Mayans had worked out the cycles of the moons and planets much earlier, but no evidence had been found, Dr Saturno said. But in 2010, an undergraduate working with Dr Saturno, Max Chamberlain, stumbled onto the house at the Mayan city Xultun which, despite being known since 1915, had never been professionally excavated. Over the decades, looters had dug deep trenches to access buildings. Mr 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. Dr Saturno's team brushed off the wall and, ''Ta-da!'' he said. ''A Technicolour, fantastically preserved mural.'' It is the oldest known preserved Mayan painting. Once the team uncovered several columns of red and black dots and dashes - the Mayans' numbering system - their meaning was evident to David Stuart, one of the world's foremost experts in Mayan hieroglyphics. It was a lunar table, showing a 4784-day cycle of the moon's phases. The calendar spans 7000 years - heading much farther into the future than the supposed doomsday date. The Washington Post Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/on-closer-inspection-doomsday-cancelled-20120511-1yi2l.html#ixzz1ugP1qzmB [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
