Scientists pinpoint Mayan calendar with carbon dating
Source: AFP |
April 12, 2013, Friday
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CARBON-DATING of an ancient beam from a Guatemalan temple may help end a century-long debate about the Mayan calendar, anthropologists said yesterday.
Experts have long wrangled over how the Mayan calendar - which leaped to prominence last year when the superstitious said it predicted the end of the world - corresponds with the European calendar.
Texts and carvings from this now-extinct culture describe rulers and great events and attribute the dates according to a complex system denoted by dots and bars, known as the Long Count.
The Long Count has five time units: Bak'tun (144,000 days); K'atun (7,200 days), Tun (360 days), Winal (20 days) and K'in (one day). The time is counted from a mythical starting point that is unknown. Spanish colonizers did their utmost to wipe out traces of the Mayan civilization, destroying evidence that could have provided a clue.
An example of the confusion this has caused is the date of a decisive battle that shaped the course of Mayan civilization.
It occurred at nine Bak'tuns, 13 K'atuns, three Tuns, seven Winals and 18 K'ins - or 1,390,838 days from the start of the count. Attempts to transcribe this into the European calendar have given estimates varying by hundreds of years.
Anthropologists led by Douglas Kennett at Pennsylvania State University hit on the idea of carbon-dating, which measures the age of organic material. They took a tiny sample from a carved wooden lintel found at a temple in the city of Tikal, the center of the now-vanished Mayan civilization.
The carvings recount the key event when Tikal's king, Jasaw Chan K'awiil I, defeated Yich'aak K'ahk, known as "Claw of Fire," who headed a rival kingdom at Calakmul, 90 kilometers away.
The team concluded the tree was cut down and carved around 658-696 AD. The estimate closely matches that of a decades-old benchmark for Mayan dating, the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson method. That method says the big victory occurred around 695-712 AD.
Armed with two good fixes on the date, historians should be able to build a more accurate chronology of the rise and fall of the Mayans, the study says.
Experts have long wrangled over how the Mayan calendar - which leaped to prominence last year when the superstitious said it predicted the end of the world - corresponds with the European calendar.
Texts and carvings from this now-extinct culture describe rulers and great events and attribute the dates according to a complex system denoted by dots and bars, known as the Long Count.
The Long Count has five time units: Bak'tun (144,000 days); K'atun (7,200 days), Tun (360 days), Winal (20 days) and K'in (one day). The time is counted from a mythical starting point that is unknown. Spanish colonizers did their utmost to wipe out traces of the Mayan civilization, destroying evidence that could have provided a clue.
An example of the confusion this has caused is the date of a decisive battle that shaped the course of Mayan civilization.
It occurred at nine Bak'tuns, 13 K'atuns, three Tuns, seven Winals and 18 K'ins - or 1,390,838 days from the start of the count. Attempts to transcribe this into the European calendar have given estimates varying by hundreds of years.
Anthropologists led by Douglas Kennett at Pennsylvania State University hit on the idea of carbon-dating, which measures the age of organic material. They took a tiny sample from a carved wooden lintel found at a temple in the city of Tikal, the center of the now-vanished Mayan civilization.
The carvings recount the key event when Tikal's king, Jasaw Chan K'awiil I, defeated Yich'aak K'ahk, known as "Claw of Fire," who headed a rival kingdom at Calakmul, 90 kilometers away.
The team concluded the tree was cut down and carved around 658-696 AD. The estimate closely matches that of a decades-old benchmark for Mayan dating, the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson method. That method says the big victory occurred around 695-712 AD.
Armed with two good fixes on the date, historians should be able to build a more accurate chronology of the rise and fall of the Mayans, the study says.
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