MesoAmericas & Beyond » Mayan

Mayan End of World Prediction Explored in Film

admin — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 03:32:52 +0000

Museum of Natural Science in Houston explores the Mayan endate. Sumners says the end of Maya time periods generally were regarded the same way we look at such things as the start of a new century or a new millennium. “It seems to be a cause of celebration. There does not seem to be any indication in the Maya writings of great disaster.

Full Article
theHoustonMuseumofnaturalscience

Ancient Maya Temples Acoustics

admin — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 06:44:56 +0000

As anyone who has visited the ancient Mayan and Aztec sites in Mexico might have noticed, in most of the places the architecture of the buildings produce the effect of amplifying someones voice if they speak above a certain volume. It has been built into the buildings and walls and other structures. Recently researchers have looked into this phenomenon and have concluded that “… there was an intentionality of the builders to use and modify its architecture for acoustic purposes.” The Maya held public rites and the buildings appear to serve more than one purpose. They note there is one place were sounds can be heard clearly at least the length of a football field.

The full article is is posted in the National Geographic News.

Mayan December 21, 2012 End Date Wrong?

admin — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 07:22:41 +0000

Reprint from ABCNews.

The Mayan Inscriptions' Palace at the Palenque archaeological site, in Chiapas state. (Omar Torres/AFP/Getty Images)

Professor Gerardo Aldana, an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara, said that the date could be inaccurate by 50 to 100 years or even more.

Aldana says that scholars have used the fixed numerical value called GMT constant to figure out the correlation between the Mayan and Gregorian dates. He says that the method has never been proven conclusively.

He added that his findings might challenge the accepted Gregorian dates, which are published in the new book “Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World.”

In his research, he attempted to reconstruct the astronomical practices of the ancient Maya people.

“One of the principal complications is that there are really so few scholars who know the astronomy, the epigraphy, and the archeology,” Aldana said in a release.

“Because there are so few people who are working on that, you get people who don’t see the full scope of the problem. And because they don’t see the full scope, they buy into things they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s a fun problem.”

Researcher Questions Accuracy of Mayan Calendar’s 2012 Prophecy and Other Dates

The GMT constant, named for early Mayan scholars Joseph Goodman, Juan Martinez-Hernandez and J. Eric S. Thompson, is partly based on astronomical events. Those early Mayanists relied heavily on dates found in colonial documents written in Mayan languages and recorded in the Latin alphabet, the release said.

A later scholar, American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, further supported the GMT constant.

But, through his research reconstructing Mayan astronomical practices and reviewing data in the archeological record, the release said Aldana found weaknesses in Lounsbury’s work that cause the argument behind the GMT constant to fall “like a stack of cards.”

“This may not seem to be much, but what it does is destabilize the entire argument,” he said.

“A few scholars have stood up and said, ‘No, the GMT is wrong,’” Aldana said. “But in my opinion, what they’ve done is try to provide alternatives without looking at why the GMT is wrong in the first place.”

Mayan Saunas

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:51:25 +0000

It appears the Mayans used sweat houses some 3,000 years ago, even before the Roman baths. Why would they have a sweat house when they lived in the tropics? What does Gurdjieff say on this subject? He writes in All and Everything about the five Being-Obligolnian-Strivings, the first of which is ”To have in their ordinary being-existence everything satisfying and really necessary for their planetary body.” In this connection he also writes specifically of this custom of going to the sauna or as he states it using the “hammam”:

“In order to clearly understand the necessity for this second custom . . . the process of their nourishment with the second being-food, which your favorites call ‘breath of air,’ proceeds in them, and this nourishment is taken in not only through the organs of breathing, but also through what are called the ‘pores’ present in their skin.

“Through the ‘pores’ of the skin of the beings, not only the new second being-food enters, but also through several of these pores, after the transformation of this second being-food, those parts of this food are given off from the skin which are either no longer necessary for the planetary body of the beings or which are already the results of its transformation.

“These unnecessary parts should be given off from the said ‘pores’ of the skin of beings by evaporation gradually by themselves . . .

“Now, when your favorites invented the covering of themselves with what are called ‘clothes,’ then, since these clothes of theirs began to hinder the normal elimination or evaporation of those parts of the second being-food unnecessary for the planetary body . . . they, condensing, began to form in these various pores of their skin the accumulation of a certain ‘oily-something.’

“From that time on, among a number of other factors, this also began to aid in the formation on this ill-fated planet of innumerable and various illnesses which taken together are the chief cause of the gradual shortening of the length of the existence of these unfortunates.

“a wise and learned being by name ‘Amabakhlootr,’ also from the continent Asia there, once clearly constated during this conscious observations of various facts proceeding around him, that this ‘oily-something’ which collects in the pores of the skin, has also a maleficent influence on the general functioning of the whole planetary body . . .

“As a result of the investigations and long deliberations of this Amambakhlootr . . . they arrived at the conclusion and became convinced of the impossibility of obtaining that beings similar of themselves should not wear clothes, and that it was necessary to seek a method for artificially eliminating from the pores of the skin these remains of the ‘second-food’ . . .

“Their further elucidatory experiments showed them that the cleansing of the ‘pores’ of the skin from these deposits was possible only by means of slow warming, thanks to which, this deposited ‘oily-something’ acquires the possibility of gradually dissolving and being eliminated from the pores of the skins of beings.

“Well, for this purpose, they then invented and actualized in practice special rooms which later came to be called hammams . . .”

New York Times Article Before Rome’s Baths, There Was the Maya Sweat House

Early Mayan Writing

admin — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 06:30:40 +0000

B. Beltrán / Science

This vertical column of ancient Mayan glyphs was painted on stone found in a Guatemalan pyramid complex dating back to between 200 B.C. and 300 B.C. and show the Maya were writing at a complex level 150 years earlier than previously thought, though simple glyphs are dated to as early as 600 B.C.

They were found on preserved painted walls and plaster fragments in the pyramidal structure known as Las Pinturas, in San Bartolo, Guatemala.

The writing is completely different than the Zapotec writing and indicates they are not simple derivatives of each other.

Though a lot is now known of Mayan writings it is not known what these glyphs say.

Full article is here is printed on MSNBC.