Buried throughout the Las Pinturas pyramid in San Bartolo, Guatemala, hundreds of painted plaster mural fragments supply a window into historic Maya civilization. Two of these fragments kind the earliest identified file of a Maya calendar, created between 300 and 200 B.C.
The fragments depict the date of “7 Deer” from the 260-day sacred calendar widespread throughout historic Mesoamerica and nonetheless used at the moment by indigenous communities in Guatemala and southern Mexico, archaeologist David Stuart and colleagues report April 13 in Science Advances. The calendar system’s longevity attests to the persistence of Maya mental tradition, says Stuart, of the University of Texas at Austin.
From 400 B.C. to 100 A.D., Mayas razed and rebuilt the pyramid seven instances, making a collection of discrete time capsules stacked on prime of one another, says research coauthor Heather Hurst, mission director of the San Bartolo-Xultun Regional Archaeological Project. By radiocarbon relationship each the fabric within the layer the place the calendar fragments have been discovered and the fabric used to bury that layer, researchers decided a slender time window by which the 7 Deer day file would have been produced.
In a calendar as soon as widespread throughout Mesoamerica, 13 numbers and 20 indicators are blended and matched to symbolize 260 particular dates comparable to “7 Deer” (illustrated). The numbers 13 and 20 are sacred within the area, and the 260 days could mirror the size of human gestation.David StuartIn a calendar as soon as widespread throughout Mesoamerica, 13 numbers and 20 indicators are blended and matched to symbolize 260 particular dates comparable to “7 Deer” (illustrated). The numbers 13 and 20 are sacred within the area, and the 260 days could mirror the size of human gestation.David Stuart
After twenty years of excavation, the location continues to be an essential supply of historic Maya artifacts. The earliest identified Maya writing, additionally dated to between 300 and 200 B.C., was present in the identical time capsule because the 7 Deer day file (SN: 1/17/06).
The 260-day calendar system “survived not only close to 1,800 years in the Maya world before the Spanish showed up, but it persisted even more recently, since conquests . . . in some of the most oppressed areas,” Stuart says. “I find that an incredible thing.”
In truth, the intricacy of the depiction means that the calendar system had already existed for hundreds of years by the point it was drawn, says Stephen Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University in Providence, R.I., who was not concerned within the research. The characters are “very well practiced. This isn’t a stumbling baby step.”
Ten different fragments described within the research function completely different kinds of handwriting that point out a number of scribes labored on the murals. This means that the Maya literary custom was already strong by this time, Houston says. “There’s a density of knowledge here.”
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