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.”
Four trees at the Cardinal Directions
Diagram of Dante's Divine Comedy
The multi-layered universe of the Mesoamerian culture has been taught and appears in books as if it has been proven. Jesper Nielsen’s article Dante’s heritage: questioning the multi-layered model of the Mesoamerican universe questions this notion.
It appears the pre-conquest model of the universe was of the cardinal directions, the center, the upper world and Underworld thus making for a three tiered universe. The different levels were divided into different regions and on each of the levels these different regions correspond to the four cardinal directions.
The number nine is prominent. It is represented by a god in the center and two gods at each of the four cardinal directions. These added up equal nine.
After the conquest, it appears there was a mixture of the cosmological ideas from Dante’s The Divine Comedy brought by the Franciscan friars with the ideas of the native Indian’s resulting in a skewed view of their universe which is how it is taught now and not seriously questioned.
The full article can be viewed at the following link.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3284/is_320_83/ai_n42366465/
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.
MesoAmerias.com has published Daniel Brinton’s argument that Tula was merely one of the towns built and occupied by that tribe of the Nahuas known as Azteca or Mexica and its inhabitants were called Toltecs, but there was never any such distinct tribe or nationality; they were merely the ancestors of this branch of the Azteca and the Toltec “empire” is a baseless fable.
The paper is published in MesoAmericas Book Collection.
The section of the main site MesoAmericas.com for the people of the ancient cultures has been started. Here is the first paragraph:
Olmec Mother Culture
The earliest known civilization in Mesoamerica is the Olmec. It appears they are the genesis of most of the aspects of the Mesoamerican cultures. The form of their government, pyramid-temple building, writing, astronomy, art, mathematics, economics and religion became the template for succeeding cultures. The questions of where the Olmec received their inspiration and knowledge, not to mention the required force, to create the Mesoamerican culture is rarely examined deeply.
More to come…
What mystery was evoked,
Seeing hieroglyphs for the first time,
With no comprehension of the mind,
To resurface at a later time,
What does this riddle represent to me?
Maybe unraveling it, unravels something in me.
