THE MAYA CALENDAR FINALLY HAS A STARTING POINT: CARBON DATING FINALLY GIVES THE MAYA CALENDAR ITS DATE

 

 photo: lightbox images

One of the enduring mysteries of the Maya was the actual date in which their calendar starts.

Notwithstanding the barrage of information bestowed on the more of less credulous viewers through a number of documentaries and programs, the actual date in which the Maya calendar begins was never truly ascertained.

A new type of carbon dating has now enabled archeaologists to name that date with much greater precision.

Many researchers have spent countless years trying to decipher the texts and lintels that give clues to the calendar's meaning.  

The complex system of dots and bars in the calendar is called the Long Count and consists of subunits called Bak'tun.  The subdivision of a Bak'tun into smaller periods, like the K'atun which consists of 7,200 days, the Tun, which is similar to our calendar of 360 days and the K'in, which represents the 24 hour period, make it the complex system we admire today.

The problem so far had been that any prediction of the end of the last Bak'tun which would have spelled the end of times, would have been pretty much fictitious, since the starting date of the first Bak'tun was never fixed.  

Unfortunately, most of the Mayan artifacts that could have given us better clues to the Mayan culture were destroyed by the Conquistadores.  So what was left was insufficient to determine a precise date, and any interpretation so far had variations that could span hundreds of years.

One of the ways the original date of the calendar was fixed was by determining the date of a crucial Maya battle as a point of reference. That battle occurred at nine Bak'tuns, 13 Kat'uns, three Tuns seven Winals and 18 Kins or 1,390,838 days from the start of the calendar count.  Knowing when the battle occurred would have given a date to the calendar inception itself.

  

A technique in carbon dating,  called carbon 14, can give a better fix on the exact time, since it measures the decay of organic matter which has a precise and steady rate of decay.  

One of the lintels in which the carvings had been made was made of wood, an organic material that could be examined using carbon dating.

The results were that the tree from which the calendar was carved dated to approximately 658-696 AD.  That estimate is a close match to an earlier estimate called the Goodman-Martinez Method. The latter method had placed the battle at around 695-712. 

The discrepancy in the date span is also due to the wood itself.  The lintel examined was made from the sapotilla tree, which has a very hard wood that makes its use very difficult.  Many years would have been needed from the time of harvesting of the wood to preparation, since at the time the Maya did not have much more than stone - age tools.

 Source: France 24/ 4.11.13