The artwork on the walls of a Maya dwelling is considered by archaeologists to be the first discovery of its kind.
For the first time, archaeologists excavating at the large, monumental Maya center of Xultún in Guatemala have uncovered a structure featuring 9th century wall paintings with numbers and calculations related to the Maya calendars, including numerical records of lunar and possibly planetary cycles. The finding predates by several hundred years the heretofore oldest known record of calendars, which were found in the famous Maya bark-paper Codices.
Tucked away under the dense vegetation of Guatemala's Peten region rain forest, the structure is theorized to be the house of a scribe with connections to the Maya king or royal family of Xultún.
"For the first time we get to see what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community," said archaeologist and expedition leader William Saturno of Boston University. "It's like an episode of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' a geek math problem and they're painting it on the wall. They seem to be using it like a blackboard."
The paintings were found in one room of the house structure. They represent the first Maya art to be found on the walls of a house. All other Maya paintings adorned such structures as temples, royal tombs and other ritual structures.
The house was first discovered in 2010 by student Max Chamberlain who, working with Saturno, was investigating looters' trenches. Once they realized the potential of the find, Saturno and his team launched a formal excavation of it under a series of grants from the National Geographic Society. Working feverishly against the clock, they had to excavate ahead of the upcoming rainy season, which would threaten to destroy what was being exposed through excavation. The hard, expedited work was well rewarded.
Uncovered were three walls adorned with paintings. The east wall of the room was illustrated with a black-painted human figure and remnants of others, and a proliferation of small red and black glyphs, some apparently representing the various calendrical cycles charted by the Maya, such as the 260-day ceremonial calendar, the 365-day solar calendar, the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus and the 780-day cycle of Mars. David Stuart, Schele Professor of Mesoamerican Art and Writing at the University of Texas-Austin, deciphered the glyphs. "There are tiny glyphs all over the wall", says Stuart, "bars and dots representing columns of numbers. It's the kind of thing that only appears in one place — the Dresden Codex, which the Maya wrote many centuries later. We've never seen anything like it."
The north wall features a painting of a seated king wearing blue feathers. Near it is a well-preserved painting of a man in vibrant orange and holding a pen. Maya glyphs near the face identify him as "Younger Brother Obsidian". According to what has been learned from other Maya sites, Saturno suggests that he could be the son or younger brother of the king, and possibly the artist or scribe who lived in the house. Four long numbers on the wall are suggested to represent all of the astronomical cycles — such as those of Mars, Venus and the lunar eclipses, extending about 7,000 years into the future.
The west wall depicts three seated male figures painted in black with white loincloths, wearing medallions around their necks and single-feathered, miter-style head dresses. One of the figures is identified as "Older Brother Obsidian." Another is identified as a youth.
"It's weird that the Xultún finds exist at all," Saturno says. "Such writings and artwork on walls don't preserve well in the Maya lowlands, especially in a house buried only a meter below the surface."
Regarding the calendrical features, the scholars suggest that the symbols represent the Maya's world view, which was actually unlike today's popular notion that the Maya predicted the end of the world. Says Saturno, "the ancient Maya predicted the world would continue, that 7,000 years from now, things would be exactly like this. We keep looking for endings. The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It's an entirely different mindset."
Xultún, the ancient Maya site of which the house structure is a part, was first discovered about 100 years ago by Guatemalan workers and then mapped in the 1920s by Sylvanus Morley. It was again mapped by a team from Harvard University in the 1970s, accounting for 56 structures, although thousands more remain uncounted. Saturno's excavations reveal that monumental construction began there in the Early Classic, or the first centuries B.C., and that the center thrived until near the end of the Classic period, around the end of the 9th to 10th centuries A.D. to It is located only about five miles from San Bartolo, where, interestingly, Saturno discovered rare mural wall paintings within a Maya ritual structure.
The detailed research of the find can be found in the May 11, 2012 issue of Science. Science is published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society
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