They Found Page 2...

Good news for those looking forward to Christmas, the world’s not ending in December 2012!

Archaeologists not working for some lame cable TV program have discovered a new, but really old Mayan calendar that extends our purchasing power into George Jetson territory.

The Mayans, best known for crackpot misinterpretations of their
Mesoamerican scribblings, were obsessed with time, and some had
theorized the ancient culture, which had not predicted Spaniards, had
somehow predicted The End of Time.

Not so, says someone really smart about this sort of thing.

“The Mayan calendar is going to keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future,” said archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas, who worked to decipher glyphs found in 2010 in the ancient Maya city of Xultun in northeast Guatemala.

The calendar, the oldest Mayan one ever discovered, features stacked
bars and dots that count lunar cycles. It was likely drawn up in the
800s, about the time Pope Leo III (who used the more accurate Julian
calendar) crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in Saint
Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

The original article on the discovery appears in Science magazine. LiveScience.com has a good writeup online.

Archaeologist William Saturno recently discovered a new Mayan calendar that debunks the myth that the world will end in December 2012.

According to LiveScience,
the discovery was made in 2010 by one of Saturno’s undergraduate
students during a field study of Xultun, an ancient Mayan city in
Gautemala. The student noticed black and red paint in a trench that was
most likely dug by looters. Saturno decided to investigate the room that
the looters had failed to penetrate.

Saturno was pleasantly surprised to find a well-preserved painting of
a Mayan king and his subjects. On the east wall of the room was a set
of hieroglyphs that would later be analyzed as a new Mayan calendar.
It’s been suggested than an ancient Mayan scribe must have used this
room to work and wrote the calender on the wall as a reference.

The Mayans split their year into 13, 400-year sections called
baktuns. However, the newly discovered wall calendar shows that Mayan’s
conceptualized time in up to cycles of 17 baktuns. Mayan scholars have
known for a while that the Mayan calendar doesn’t end but rather begins
anew after the 13th baktuns. This new discover confirms that Mayans
believed that the world would still exist long after the 13th baktun
ends in December 2012.

As Anthony Aveni of Colgate University said, reports the Associated Press,
“Why would they go into those numbers if the world is going to come to
an end this year? You could say a number that big at least suggests that
time marches on." Aveni has a point: the calendar suggests that Earth
will still be around for at least 6,000 years after 2012.

Photo from National Geographic via USA TODAY

(USA TODAY) - Newly discovered wall writings found in
Guatemala show the famed Maya culture's obsession with cycles of time.
But they also show calendars that go well beyond 2012, the year when the
vanished civilization, according to popular culture, expected the end
of the world.

"So much for the supposed end of the world," says archaeologist
William Saturno of Boston University, lead author of a study in the
journal Science, which reported the discovery on Thursday.

Discovered in the ruins of Xultun, the astronomical calendar was
unearthed from a filled-in scribe's room. While about 7 million Maya
people still live in Central America today, the "Classic" Maya
civilization of pyramid temples had collapsed there by about 900 A.D.,
leaving only a few birch-bark books dating to perhaps the 14th century
as records of their astronomy, until now.

PHOTOS: Scenes from the discovery

"The numbers we found indicate an obsession with time and cycles of
time, some of them very large," Saturno says. "Maya scribes most likely
transcribed the numbers on the wall in this room into (books) just like
the ones later seen by conquistadors."

Explorers first reported the site of Xultun, once a large Maya
center, in 1915. But it was only two years ago that National Geographic
Society-funded archaeologists noted a small residential room partly
exposed by looters. The room's walls proved to hold murals and small,
delicate hieroglyphs inscribed in rows between paintings of scribes and
rulers that not only corresponded to a 260 day ceremonial calendar and
365-day year, but the 584-day sky track of Venus and 780-day one of
Mars.

Examination of the rows shows they are columns of numbers and symbols
similar to lunar eclipse calculations found in early 16th century Maya
writings that tied astronomical events to rituals. Some of them include
dates corresponding to a time after the year 3500.

"A fascinating discovery and a first in Maya archaeology," says Maya
anthropologist Victoria Bricker of Tulane University in New Orleans. She
notes its conclusive linkage of the later books to the Classic Maya
calendar carved in stone dating back to before 300 A.D. The room's wall
calculations likely served as a blackboard for scribes, in a society
where festivals, rituals and farming were tied to astronomical
observations.

"Seeing the actual writing on the wall certainly gives us a little
insight into history," says Maya writing expert Simon Martin, co-curator
of the "Maya 2012: Lords of Time" exhibition now ongoing at
Philadelphia's Penn Museum. Although once viewed as peaceful
star-gazers, more recent scholarly work has revealed that politics, war
and trade dominated ancient Maya society. "We're seeing the pendulum
swing back with this discovery, where we can now see astronomy playing a
role in ordering their society," Martin says.

USA TODAY