So by consulting the table, a priest, say, could tell which moon god would preside over a particular date. Each column is topped by the face of one of three moon gods - a jaguar, a skull and a woman. The table is broken into 27 columns, each representing six lunar months. It was a lunar table, showing a 4,784-day cycle of the moon’s phases. Once the team uncovered several columns of red and black dots and dashes - the Mayans’ numbering system - the meaning of these figures was almost immediately evident to David Stuart, one of the world’s foremost experts in Mayan hieroglyphics. One of them is named “older brother obsidian.” Mayan experts have no idea whom these mysterious figures might represent.
Three mysterious figures wearing black also march across the wall. Next to the king, a scribe holds a writing instrument. And it’s also the oldest known preserved Mayan painting. The mural is the first Mayan painting found in a small building instead of a large public space.
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I don’t know how it survived.” Saturno immediately e-mailed contacts at the National Geographic Society, which agreed to fund a full excavation of the building. “A Technicolor, fantastically preserved mural. Saturno’s team brushed off the wall and “ta-da!” he said. The buildings were too shallow - any paint on their walls would surely be long gone, erased by water, dirt, insects and encroaching tree roots.īut sure enough, Chamberlain stumbled onto a wall, open to a trench, showing two red lines.Ī 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 jewelry. One day at lunch, Chamberlain announced his intention to find paintings by crawling through the trenches. Over the decades, looters had dug deep trenches to access buildings. Saturno said researchers have long assumed that the Mayans had worked out the cycles of the moons and planets much earlier, but no evidence of such work had ever been found.īut in 2010, an undergraduate student working with Saturno, Max Chamberlain, stumbled onto the house as the team began to excavate at a Mayan city, Xultun, which, despite being known since 1915, had never been professionally excavated. But those pages hail from several hundred years later than the newly found calendars. It’s like looking into da Vinci’s workshop.”īefore the new find, the best-preserved Mayan calendars were inscribed in bark-paged books called codices, the most famous being the Dresden Codex. “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.
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