Tyrone Turner / National Geographic

Boston University archaeologist William Saturno carefully uncovers art and writings left by the Maya some 1,200 years ago. The art and other symbols on the walls may have been records kept by a scribe, Saturno theorizes. Saturno's excavation and documentation of the house were supported by the National Geographic Society.

Archaeologists have found a stunning array of 1,200-year-old Maya paintings in a room that appears to have been a workshop for calendar scribes and priests, with numerical markings on the wall that denote intervals of time well beyond the controversial cycle that runs out this December.

For years, prophets of doom have been saying that we're in for an apocalypse on Dec. 21, 2012, because that marks the end of the Maya "Long Count" calendar, which was based on a cycle of 13 intervals known as "baktuns," each lasting 144,000 days. But the researchers behind the latest find, detailed in the journal Science and an upcoming issue of National Geographic, say the writing on the wall runs counter to that bogus belief.

"It's very clear that the 2012 date, this end of 13 baktuns, while important, was turning the page," David Stuart, an expert on Maya hieroglyphs at the University of Texas at Austin, told reporters today. "Baktun 14 was going to be coming, and Baktun 15 and Baktun 16. ... The Maya calendar is going to keep going, and keep going for billions, trillions, octillions of years into the future."

The current focus of the research project, led by Boston University's William Saturno, is a 6-by-6-foot room situated beneath a mound at the Xultun archaeological site in Guatemala's Peten region. Maxwell Chamberlain, a BU student participating in the excavations there, happened to notice a poorly preserved wall protruding from a trench that was previously dug by looters, with the hints of a painting on the plaster.

Saturno said he didn't think there'd be much to the wall, but "I felt we had a responsibility to find out at the very least how large this room was."

When archaeologists worked their way into the mound, they were amazed to find that it was a richly decorated room from the Classic Maya period, dating back to roughly the year 800. One niche was adorned with the faded picture of a Maya king, wearing a blue-feathered headdress and holding a white scepter. The picture of a scribe holding a stylus, perhaps the son or brother of the king, was painted nearby with the label "Younger Brother Obsidian." Another wall showed a row of three stylized black figures, with one bearing the hieroglyphic name "Older Brother Obsidian."

Tyrone Turner / National Geographic

The painted figure of a man — possibly a scribe who once lived in the house built by the ancient Maya — is illuminated through a doorway to the dwelling, in northeastern Guatemala. The structure represents the first Maya house found to contain artwork on its walls. The research is supported by the National Geographic Society.

Tyrone Turner / National Geographic

Never-before-seen artwork — the first to be found on walls of a Maya house — adorn the dwelling in the ruined city of Xultún. The figure at left is one of three men on the house's west wall who are painted in black and wear identical costumes. One of the black figures is named "Older Brother Obsidian." The figure in the center appears to be a scribe, labeled "Younger Brother Obsidian." A Maya king is portrayed at far right. Heather Hurst rendered the paintings in clearer detail below.

Heather Hurst / National Geographic

A vibrant orange figure, kneeling in front of the king on the ruined house's north wall, is labeled "Younger Brother Obsidian," a curious title seldom seen in Maya text. The man is holding a writing instrument, which may indicate he was a scribe. The painting re-creates the design and colors of the figure in the original Maya mural.

Heather Hurst / National Geographic

Three male figures, seated and painted in black, appear in a painting that re-creates the design and colors of a Mural found on the ruined house's west wall. The men wear only white loincloths and medallions around their necks, plus a headdress bearing another medallion and a single feather. One of the figures is particularly burly and is labeled "Older Brother Obsidian." Another is labeled as a youth.

Heather Hurst / National Geographic

A Maya king, seated and wearing an elaborate headdress of blue feathers, adorns the north wall of the ruined house discovered at the Maya site of Xultun. An attendant, at right, leans out from behind the king's headdress. The painting by artist Heather Hurst re-creates the design and colors of the original Maya artwork at the site.

Rows of numbers and hieroglyphs were painted on yet another wall. In fact, it appeared that the wall had been plastered over repeatedly and covered with new sets of figures. "What these are giving us are time spans," Stuart said. "Not so much dates, but Maya notations of elapsed time."

Stuart said some sets of numbers denoted lunar cycles of 177 or 178 days, along with the sign for a patron god that was associated with each cycle. "This was, we think, a calculator for a Maya priest, an astronomer, to figure out lunar ages," he said.

In a news release, Saturno said this represents the first look at "what may be actual records kept by a scribe, whose job was to be official record keeper of a Maya community."

"It's like an episode of TV's 'Big Bang Theory,' a geek math problem and they're painting it on the wall," Saturno said. "They seem to be using it like a blackboard."

In addition to lunar cycles, the calculations on the wall could relate to the periods of Venus, Mercury and Mars, the researchers reported. Stuart said such calculations could have come into play for predicting eclipses. He imagined that there might be "one or more, maybe two or three of these astronomers or calendar priests working, sitting there on a workbench and writing these notations on the wall."

One array of numbers would be particularly intriguing to doomsday debunkers: lists that appear to denote wide ranges of accumulated time, including a 17-baktun period. "There was a lot more to the Maya calendar than just 13 baktuns," Stuart observed. Seventeen baktuns would stand for about 6,700 years, which is much longer than the 13-baktun cycle of 5,125 years. However, Stuart cautioned that the time notation shouldn't be read as specifying a date that's farther in the future than Dec. 21.

"It may just be that this is a mathematical number that they find interesting, kind of floating in time," he told me. "But it certainly is expressing a capacity of time. If they were calculating something from their time period, around 800 A.D., yeah, this would have gone way beyond 2012. But again, we're not sure exactly what the base of the calculation is."

William Saturno and David Stuart / National Geographic

Four long numbers on the north wall of the ruined house relate to the Maya calendar and computations about the moon, sun and possibly Venus and Mars; the dates may stretch some 7,000 years into the future. These are the first calculations Maya archaeologists have found that seem to tabulate all of these cycles in this way. Although they all involve common multiples of key calendrical and astronomical cycles, the exact significance of these spans of time is not known.

Saturno said archaeologists have been trying to get out the word that the end of the Maya culture's 13-baktun "Long Count" calendar didn't signify the end of the world, but merely a turnover to the next cycle in a potentially infinite series — like going from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1 on a modern calendar, or turning the odometer on a car over from 99999.9 to 00000.0.

"If someone is a hard-core believer that the world is going to end in 2012, no painting is going to convince them otherwise," he said. "The only thing that can convince them otherwise is waiting until Dec. 22, 2012 — which fortunately for all of us isn't that far away."

Saturno and his colleagues plan to be studying the Xultun site long after that time. He said the workshop was apparently part of a residential compound that had been razed over the ages; the workshop was preserved because it was filled in with material rather than smashed down from above. That could suggest that the room was recognized as a special place even when it was abandoned. Research into the room and its purpose is continuing, Saturno said.

In its day, Xultun apparently served as one of the major ceremonial cities for the Classic Maya civilization — and yet it's just barely been explored, in part because the area is so remote.

"We have probably 99.9 percent of Xultun left to explore," Saturno said. "We're going to be working on it probably for many decades to come. ... Four or five years in to the research project, we have yet to determine its actual boundaries — so my estimate may be off. We may have 99.99 percent left to excavate."

More Maya mysteries:

• How the Maya lived
• Maya myth revealed in stucco
• Maya doom teaches climate lesson
• Even the Maya are sick of 2012 hype
• Gallery: Seven archaeological mysteries

In addition to Saturno and Stuart, authors of the Science paper, "Ancient Maya Astronomical Tables from Xultun, Guatemala," include Anthony Aveni and Franco Rossi. The Xultun excavations between 2008 and 2012 were supported by Boston University and the National Geographic Society.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, shows off an ark, or stone shrine model, that was found during excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, an ancient settlement southwest of Jerusalem.

An archaeological dig near Goliath's biblical hometown has yielded evidence of Judean religious practices 3,000 years ago, pointing up fresh historical connections to the stories of King David and King Solomon.

"We have a city with a population relating to the Kingdom of Judah," Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told me today. "This is totally different from Philistine, Canaanite or the cult in the Kingdom of Israel."

The site, known today as Khirbet Qeiyafa, is about 20 miles (30 kilometers) southwest of Jerusalem, on top of a hill overlooking the Valley of Elah. For the past five years, Garfinkel and his colleagues have been excavating the ruins of a fortified city there, situated across from what was once the Philistine city of Gath. In the Bible, the giant Goliath came out from Gath to face the Israelites, and was smitten by a rock hurled from David's sling.

Garfinkel can't vouch for the story of Goliath, but he says the weapons, the cult items and even the animal bones found around Khirbet Qeiyafa support his view that the settlement was a key military outpost for the historical House of David, riven by conflict. "There was something here quite military and quite aggressive," he said. "It was not a peaceful village."

Based on radiocarbon dating of burned olive pits found at the site, archaeologists believe the ancient city lasted for only 40 years, from 1020 to 980 B.C., before it was destroyed. Some skeptics have suggested that Khirbet Qeiyafa was just another Canaanite settlement, and that David was at best a minor chieftain, or perhaps a folkloric figure like Robin Hood. But Garfinkel said the items found at the site strengthen the connection to King David and the religious practices specified in the Bible.

"Over the years, thousands of animal bones were found, including sheep, goats and cattle, but no pigs," he said in a news release from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "Now we uncovered three cultic rooms, with various cultic paraphernalia, but not even one human or animal figurine was found. This suggest that the population on Khirbet Qeiyafa observed two biblical bans — on pork and on graven images — and thus practiced a different cult from that of the Canaanites or the Philistines."

Garfinkel told me that the absence of human imagery was peculiar to the Judeans. "In the northern Kingdom of Israel, you find human representations," he said.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

One of the cultic standing stones can be seen in this picture of the Khirbet Qeiyafa site.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

This basalt altar was found during excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

A decorated clay shrine model was found at the Khirbet Qeiyafa site.

The cult objects included five standing stones, two basalt altars, two pottery libation vessels and two portable shrines. Garfinkel said the shrines reflected a Mesopotamian architectural style that went back centuries before the era of King David, and probably inspired the look of the palace built by Solomon, David's son. "It seems that Solomon didn't want to be Canaanite and took a different model from Mesopotamia," Garfinkel told me.

The shrines are boxlike containers made of stone or clay. "I think they were called in Hebrew 'Aron,'" Garfinkel wrote in an email. "This had been translated into English as 'ark' and became a mystic artifact. I think that the Hebrew name was just a simple technical term: a box for keeping god symbols."

Such shrines were probably similar in look to the "Ark of God" highlighted in the Bible as well as in such movies as "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

The clay shrine has an intricate facade, featuring two guardian lions, pillars and birds standing on the roof. The stone shrine was painted red, and its facade is decorated with characteristic triglyph symbols as well as a triple-recessed doorway in front. Garfinkel said the Bible may have referred to those architectural features in its description of Solomon's palace. The technical term usually translated as referring to pillars ("Slaot") may actually be talking about triglyphs, while another term that was thought to refer to windows ("Sequfim")  might instead refer to the doorways.

"Now you can see by the model that you have triglyphs at the roof, and you have recessed doorways," Garfinkel said. Such features are also mentioned in biblical references to King Solomon's temple, which was built decades after the age that gave rise to the shrines found at Khirbet Qeiyafa.

Will these finds settle the debate over the historical David? Garfinkel would like to think so. "Various suggestions that completely deny the biblical tradition regarding King David and argue that he was a mythological figure, or just a leader of a small tribe, are now shown to be wrong," he said in today's news release.

But The Times of Israel quoted Bar-Ilan University's Aren Maeir, who's in charge of the dig at Gath, as saying the discoveries don't provide any dramatic new evidence for either side in the debate. For example, the fact that the clay shrine was decorated with lions and birds undercuts Garfinkel's claim that no graven images were found at the site. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted another expert, Tel Aviv University's Nadav Na'aman, as saying that the Canaanites, like the Judeans, observed a ban on eating pork.

Maeir said the distinctions between the various peoples mentioned in the Bible — including David's Israelites and Goliath's Philistines — were "fuzzier than the way they are often described."

"There's no question that this is a very important site, but what exactly it was — there is still disagreement about that," Maeir said. In a blog posting, Maeir said "what is clearly missing is a close interface with mainstream biblical and [Ancient Near East] textual scholars." 

What do you think? Feel free to weigh in with your vote in the poll above, or add your comments below.

More about biblical archaeology:

• In Israel, diggers unearth the Bible's bad guys
• Dig yields what may be the oldest Hebrew text
• Artifact suggests Bible written centuries earlier
• Professor hunts for the 'Lost Ark of the Covenant'
• Gallery: Eight Jewish archaeological discoveries
• Cosmic Log archive on archaeology

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scott Thompson / Maryhill Museum file

Maryhill Museum's concrete replica of Stonehenge was designed to duplicate the ancient English monument.

British researchers conducted experiments at a Stonehenge stand-in as well as the actual 5,000-year-old monument to determine how sounds echoed within the ancient circle of stones — and they found that the sounds would have taken on an eerie reverberation.

"We can expect such a space to have a striking effect on someone of that time, identical to what we feel nowadays when we go into a church," the University of Salford's Bruno Fazenda, who orchestrated the research project, told me in an email.

The study is described on the university's website in a technical analysis as well as a news release issued last week, but the upshot is that the Neolithic people who gathered inside the circle could well have had a religious aural experience. That meshes with the view of most archaeologists that the monument on England's Salisbury Plain took on the trappings of a place of healing — a "Neolithic Lourdes," if you will.

It's not easy to reconstruct the sounds of ancient Stonehenge: For one thing, many of the standing stones are missing from what was thought to be their original places, ruining the acoustic arrangement. For another thing, researchers are not allowed to run electrical power out to the site, or bring in a generator. That limits the types of sound equipment and scientific instruments that can be used on site.

Replicating the reverb
Fazenda and his colleagues from the University of Huddersfield and the University of Bristol found a couple of clever solutions to those challenges. They brought air-filled balloons to the Stonehenge site in 2009, then popped the balloons with a needle and recorded the reverb with a microphone and a digital field recorder. The reflected sounds of the pops were hard to make out, but they appeared to follow a pattern of 1-second reverberation time at midfrequencies, for locations that were within the ruins of the stone circle.

To study the reverberation patterns in detail, the team headed off to the Maryhill Museum in Goldendale, Wash., which has a full-scale concrete replica of Stonehenge on its grounds. The monument was built by millionaire industrialist Samuel Hill as a tribute to fallen World War I servicemen. The museum let the researchers make their measurements with more sensitive instruments, powered by on-site generators. The same balloon-popping technique was used, and the readings confirmed the reverberation pattern that the team found at the real Stonehenge.

"For an outdoor space, the stone circle exhibits quite a 'live' acoustic environment," Fazenda said. "In the Neolithic, such an environment was not very common at all. The only spaces that might sustain reverberation were caves and perhaps some natural features such as opposing cliff faces."

Fazenda said the echo effect would be much more like what you hear in a cathedral than in a concert hall.

"The center of the space has potential for some focusing effects," he said. "That's the point where all reflections arrive at the same time, and with the largest gap relative to direct sound. On paper we would expect that to sound striking. However, there are quite a lot of scattering effects from the stones, so the clear echoes are somewhat destroyed by it."

He stressed that it's not at all clear whether Stonehenge was designed with the acoustics in mind, but he and his colleagues do think that the setting would have added a special something to drumbeats, chants or music inside the stone circle.   

'Research hobby'
Fazenda, who teaches audio production at Salford, has been working on this project for the past four years on an unfunded basis. "It has been a kind of 'research hobby' that I have managed to do after hours (don't really call it spare time)," he wrote. He believes the project could break new ground in the field of archaeoacoustics — the study of the sound characteristics of ancient spaces.

"The original focus was on studying the acoustic response of the space," he said. "The recent output has been that we replicated it using wavefield synthesis, which immerses you in a sound field, thus giving you the most approximate aural experience that you could get of being in the space. That was shown at a few recent events, and we have a permanent demo in our labs here at Salford. A wavefield synthesis system uses +64 channels and speakers, so it is not really portable."

Such a system can be tuned to provide a virtual-reality sense of the sounds of Stonehenge, as well as the sounds of other ancient settings that are no longer configured the way they were in their heyday. Want to hear the roar of the crowd in the Roman Colosseum? There's a wavefield synthesis app for that.

Fazenda is preparing a paper on his "research hobby" for Acta Acustica, the journal of the European Acoustics Association. He's also writing a chapter for a book on the acoustics and music of British prehistory. (For more on that subject, check out the website of the Acoustics and Music of British Prehistory Research Network.)

You can expect to hear more about the sounds of Stonehenge in the months and years ahead. In the meantime, give a listen to these sound files, and follow the Web links for more about archaeoacoustics.

Stonehenge sound files:

• Hand-clapping outside and inside the Maryhill stone circle (via Sonic Wonders)
• Univ. of Salford's rendering of a song with Stonehenge-style reverb (WAV file)
• Sounds of Stonehenge ... including a podcast on sound heritage

More about archaeoacoustics:

• Scientists revive sacred sounds
• Was Stonehenge inspired by a sound illusion?
• It turns out that cavemen loved to sing
• Stonehenge: Totally awesome place for raves
• Researchers re-create scary pre-Columbian sounds
• Acoustic archaeology yields mind-tripping tricks
• Listen to the sounds of science

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Negotiations to decide the fate of a $189 million collection of artifacts from the Titanic are going into overtime.

Atlanta-based Premier Exhibitions, which is seeking to sell 5,500 items recovered from the shipwreck site over the past 25 years, said today that it's "in discussions with multiple parties" for the purchase of the collection. The legal rulings that paved the way for the sale require that the collection must be sold as a single lot — and that the buyer must make the artifacts available for public exhibition and research.

The deadline for sealed bids passed more than a week ago, and since then Premier Exhibitions has been weighing the offers.

"In order for the company to settle on the most appropriate bidder and maximize the ultimate value of the artifacts for shareholders, it conduct these negotiations and due diligence in confidence," Premier said in a statement. The company said it would "provide an additional update to shareholders as soon as practical," and would reschedule a news conference that had been planned for Wednesday to announce the winning bid.

Premier's subsidiary, RMS Titanic Inc., is the only company with legal permission to recover objects from the Titanic, which ran into an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, during its maiden trans-Atlantic voyage from Southampton to New York. More than 1,500 of the ship's 2,228 passengers and crew lost their lives in the disaster. The 100th anniversary of the tragedy is boosting interest in the Titanic to new heights.

In addition to the physical artifacts, RMS Titanic has been collecting data and high-resolution imagery of the wreck site, two miles beneath the Atlantic surface. Its most recent expedition took place in 2010. The archaeological assets, including underwater video and 3-D mapping, are among the property being sold.

"Titanic is slowly being consumed by iron-eating microbes on the sea floor and, at some point in the not-too-distant future, it will be only a memory," Mark Sellers, chairman of Premier and RMS Titanic, said back in January. "We are proud of what we have accomplished as salvor-in-possession of the wreck site and we believe we have faithfully honored the legacy of those who were lost. After all those efforts, we have determined that the time has come for us to transfer ownership of this collection to a steward who is able to continue our efforts and will preserve and honor her legacy."

Actually, three major Titanic auctions are taking place this month. In addition to the Premier Exhibitions sale, which is being managed by Guernsey's auction house, there's a Bonhams auction set for Sunday in New York, and an RR Auction online sale due to begin April 19. Last month, the highlight of a London auction was the sale of a first-class menu from the Titanic's last lunch for $120,000.

Ben Stansall / AFP - Getty Images

A wreath floats in berths 43/44, the place from which the RMS Titanic set sail on its ill-fated maiden voyage 100 years ago, during a ceremony at Southampton's docks on April 10, 2012.

It's not clear whether any more artifacts will ever be brought up from the Titanic site. Beginning on the 100th anniversary of the sinking, the remains of the Titanic will be covered by a 2001 U.N. convention on the protection of underwater cultural heritage. In a statement issued last week, UNESCO said parties to the convention can seize artifacts taken from the Titanic, and prevent exploration of the site that is "deemed unscientific or unethical."

Neither the United States nor Canada are parties to that convention. However, UNESCO said the protections specified in the convention are also reflected in an international agreement on Titanic salvage that was signed by those two countries as well as France and Britain.

One of the most outspoken critics of Titanic salvaging has been oceanographer Robert Ballard, who was one of the co-discoverers of the Titanic wreck site in 1985. He has long said that if he could do it all over again, he would not publicize the location of the wreck, and today on NPR's "Talk of the Nation," he said he now wishes he claimed the site for himself.

"When I found the Titanic, I went to the courts, and I said, 'Well, can I own the Titanic?' And they said, yes. It's an abandoned shipwreck. All you have to do is go down and retrieve one object of saucer or plate or something, come into the courts, and we'll make you the owner. But we'll make you the owner under one condition, that you remove it from the bottom of the ocean. ... I was opposed to that. I wished I'd gone and got that one cup and brought it up and said, 'I want to turn it into an underwater museum.' I'd rather take people there through the technologies we now have, and I really regret I didn't do that."

In retrospect, do you think that would have been the better course? Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts about the fate of Titanic artifacts in the comment space below.

More about the Titanic:

• Titanic cruise diverted due to medical emergency
• Ship leaves NYC to visit Titanic graves in Canada
• Astrophysicist gets 'Titanic' director to tweak the sky
• 10 reasons for the Titanic tragedy
• Titanic's legacy: a fascination with disasters
• New images of Titanic shipwreck revealed
• PhotoBlog: More amazing pictures from the site
• Events mark 100th anniversary of Titanic's sinking
• Slideshow: Titanic Belfast museum makes debut  
• Cosmic Log archive on the Titanic

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

James Tabor / UNCC

A replica of the "Jonah Fish" bone box, on display at Discovery Times Square in New York, shows a fishlike figure on the left side of the box's front. Small fish figures are inscribed in a border along the top of the box. The right side of the box's front is incomplete because that area was obscured by an adjacent bone box.

The debate over a 1st-century "Jesus Discovery" tomb that may, or may not, contain the earliest known evidence of Christian iconography has taken on some of the fervor of a holy war, with some scriptural scholars protesting what they see as the "Da Vinci Codification" of modern culture.

The controversy focused on whether a fishlike figure carved into one of the limestone bone boxes from the Jerusalem tomb was really meant to be a fish — or something else. It's a key point, because fish have historically been seen as early Christian symbols, and such symbols have not previously been found on Jerusalem bone boxes.

"The 'Jonah Fish' is just the next installment in the Jesus-archaeology franchise — timed, as always, to precede a major Christian feast," Steven Fine, director of Yeshiva University's Center for Israel Studies, complained in a posting to the ASOR Blog, which is published by the American Schools of Oriental Research. "I, for one, am wearied by the almost yearly 'teaching moment' presented by these types of 'discoveries.' I am hopeful, however, that — this time — a forceful and quick display of unanimous dissent by the leading members of the academic community will be taken seriously by the media and the public at large."

The underground chamber, known as the Patio Tomb because it lies beneath the patio of a present-day condo building, was explored a couple of years ago with the aid of a camera-equipped robotic arm. The project came into the global spotlight this week with the publication of "The Jesus Discovery," a book about the finds made there.

A documentary TV show, reportedly titled "The Resurrection Tomb," is due to air on the Discovery Channel this spring. It's not yet clear whether that show will be broadcast around the time of Easter Sunday, which falls on April 8 this year (April 15 for Orthodox Christians).

Discovery Times Square

In addition to the "Jonah Fish" bone box, investigators examined a different limestone bone box that had an inscription scrawled in the central area of the front face. They interpreted the third line of the inscription as referring to "lifting up" or resurrection. Such a reference could be read as a statement of faith. This is a replica of the casket that is on display at Discovery Times Square in New York.

This week's claims about the Christian character of the bone boxes seen in the Patio Tomb have attracted sharp criticism from outside experts. The tone of the debate has become so sharp that one of the scriptural scholars behind the discovery, James Tabor of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, appealed today for an end to the "personal innuendos and ugly charges about greed and corruption."

"I ask my fellow bloggers in our field to circulate this call for a change in our tone and approach to one another," he wrote on his own blog. "Enough is enough. ..."

One of Tabor's partners in the tomb study is Rami Arav, an Israeli-born archaeologist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has directed excavations in Israel for more than two decades. Arav told me today that the controversy over the findings was not unexpected.

"Whenever you make a pioneering discovery ... there will always be questions about the interpretation of what you see, particularly when things are not unequivocal," he said. "My philosophy in this kind of thing is that a good theory ... is elegant and solves more problems than it creates."

Bebeto Matthews / AP

Biblical scholar James Tabor glances over at replicas of two bone boxes found in Jerusalem's Patio Tomb during a Tuesday news conference at Discovery Times Square. A camera-equipped robotic arm like the one seen here was used to examine the boxes remotely.

Believing a fish story
For some, the claims about the "Jonah Fish" constitute a big problem. Tabor, Arav and another partner, documentary filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, have suggested that the figure alludes to the biblical story of the prophet Jonah, who was swallowed by a sea creature and vomited up alive three days later. That story held extra significance for Christians, who believed Jesus died on the cross and rose from his tomb on the third day.

The critics of the "Jesus Discovery" team say they're not swallowing the fish story. Instead, they maintain that the figure depicts a type of funerary pillar or tower, known as a "nephesh tower," or perhaps an amphora or vase. Some experts included pictures from other bone boxes, showing nephesh towers with pointed roofs.

Arav and Tabor said they had considered the interpretation of the picture as a tower or a vase, but decided that the fish made more sense. "If we suggest it could have been a tower, then we would have to put the ossuary upside down," Arav said. "This doesn't have any precedent, and I think this is even more problematic than saying it is a fish."

The team's video examination of the box also spotted several small, simple fish figures carved into an ornamental border around the main figure.

"It creates problems which I indeed don't think are problems," Arav said. "We know that the Jonah motif appears later on, but that doesn't mean that it began later on. This is not a real problem."

Jacobovici told me that he put the picture to the "Mishi test," named after his 5-year-old daughter. When he heard that some experts were suggesting that the picture showed a tower, he called Mishi over to take a look. "I said, 'What do you see here, sweetie?' She looks very intense, and says, 'A person inside a fish?'" Jacobovici recalled. "It passed the Mishi test."

Why fuss over a fish?
What difference does it make whether the picture shows a fish or a tower? The eventual outcome of the debate could have a big impact on the course of biblical archaeology. If the iconography is determined to be Christian, that would lend much more significance to what otherwise might be seen as a run-of-the-mill Jewish tomb.

What's more, Tabor and Jacobovici contend that the discovery of a Christian tomb strengthens their far more controversial claim, first made in 2007, that bone boxes in a nearby tomb might contain the earthly remains of Jesus and members of his family. The investigators reached that conclusion based on the names inscribed on the boxes, and their similarity to the names listed in biblical accounts of Jesus' brothers and sisters. Tabor says additional studies published since 2007 have strengthened his case, but other scholars are unconvinced.

Arav isn't getting involved in the debate over the "Jesus Family Tomb." But he does want to return to the Patio Tomb and go beyond the fishy debate. "We did non-invasive research in this place, and we discovered what we discovered," Arav said. "But we need also to do some invasive research."

Current estimates suggest that the Patio Tomb was used sometime between 20 B.C. and A.D. 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. Arav would like to get a better sense of the date, and perhaps run DNA tests on the remains "to see if they are associated with groups of people that we know of." It might also be possible to run tests on a cooking pot that was brought out from the tomb years ago, "to see what was offered to the dead," he said.

"There are a lot of things that hard science can help us with," Arav observed. "There are a lot of things to do."

More about bone boxes and biblical archaeology:

• New find revives 'Jesus Tomb' debate
• Doubts voiced about the 'Jesus Discovery'
• 2007: Claims about Jesus' tomb stir up a tempest
• Ancient bone box might point to Caiaphas' home
• Gallery: The archaeology of Christianity

Replicas of bone boxes from the Patio Tomb and the Jesus Family Tomb are on display at Discovery Times Square in New York City, which is also hosting an exhibit about the Dead Sea Scrolls and daily life in biblical times. The exhibit runs through April 15.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Documentary filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, co-author of the new book "The Jesus Discovery," discusses how a robotic arm was used to make archaeological discoveries during a New York news conference today.

Now that the word about "the Jesus Discovery" is out in the open, outside experts are weighing in — and many of them look upon the robotic exploration of a 1st-century Jerusalem tomb as a technological tour de force resulting in an archaeological faux pas.

On one level, the "Jesus Discovery" investigators saw this project as a follow-up on the sensational claim they made five years earlier in "The Lost Tomb of Jesus," that Jesus and members of his family were buried in what is now a southeast residential neighborhood of Jerusalem. On another level, they set forth what they said were the earliest known evidence of Christian references in the Holy City — in the form of an inscription referring to resurrection on one casket, and a fishlike design on another casket.

Today, several experts specializing in 1st-century Christianity said the investigators failed to make their case on either level.

"In my assessment, there's zero percent chance that their theory is correct," said Andrew Vaughn, executive director of the American Schools of Oriental Research, or ASOR.

Christopher Rollston, an expert in Semitic epigraphy at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in Tennessee, said that although the underground chamber is "a nice tomb ... it's hard to press it into service as an impressive find."

Some archaeologists were familiar with the project months before it came into the spotlight, but non-disclosure agreements kept them from commenting  until today's press announcement at Discovery Times Square in New York. The project has already spawned a book by scriptural scholar James Tabor and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, titled "The Jesus Discovery," and a documentary about the find is due to air on the Discovery Channel this spring.

When today's embargo lifted, the criticism from outside experts hit with full force on the ASOR Blog.

"Nothing in the book 'revolutionizes our understanding of Jesus or early Christianity,' as the authors and publisher claim, and we may regard this book as yet another in a long list of presentations that misuse not only the Bible but also archaeology," Duke University biblical scholar Eric Meyers declared.

Jodi Magness, a religious-studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said "it pains me to see archaeology hijacked in the service of non-scientific interests, whether they are religious, financial, or other." In her view, Tabor, Jacobovici and their colleagues set out to dig up evidence to support their earlier claims about a different tomb nearby, the so-called "Jesus Family Tomb" — and then rustle up a fresh round of media attention.

"Professional archaeologists do not search for objects or treasures such as Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, or the Holy Grail," she wrote. "Usually these sorts of expeditions are led by amateurs (nonspecialists) or academics who are not archaeologists. Archaeology is a scientific process."

Old and new claims
The main objection to the claims for the Jesus Family Tomb, like the claims themselves, retraces ground that's been well trod since 2007: Just because bone boxes are marked with the name "Jesus" and the names of his brothers and sisters, as mentioned in the Bible, doesn't necessarily mean these are the actual biblical figures.

Tabor and Jacobovici produced a statistical analysis looking at the frequency of names in ancient Jerusalem, and claimed that the close fit to the names on Jesus' family tree couldn't be just a coincidence. Last month, Tabor said further research has strengthened the case he and Jacobovici laid out in 2007.

The critics insisted once again that a statistical argument could never win the day. "Dramatic claims require dramatic evidence. ... The claims of Tabor and Jacobovici for this tomb are no more convincing now than they were then," Rollston wrote.

But what about the inscription in the more recently explored tomb, known as the Patio Tomb? And what about the fish? Rollston said the fish was more probably a type of ornamental design typically seen on Jewish bone boxes, known as a nephesh tower. Where Tabor and Jacobovici saw the "fins" of the fish, Rollston saw the eaves of the tower's roof.

Even if it was intended to be a fish, "it would most naturally be understood as simply a reflection of a nautical motif in a tomb," or perhaps representative of the deceased's occupation — for example, a fishmonger. Unlike Tabor, Rollston did not rule out the possibility that a Jew would have such a design engraved on the bone box.

James Tabor / UNCC

James Tabor, a religious-studies researcher at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, outlined these designs found in various contexts, including "nephesh" images that have been found carved on 1st-century Jewish caskets, a fish drawing found in a Christian catacomb, and the "Patio Tomb fish" design seen in the tomb that Tabor and his colleagues explored using a camera-equipped robotic arm. Tabor's critics say the fishlike design is actually a variant of the nephesh tower design.

As for the inscription, Rollston said the resurrection connection was questionable. Tabor, Jacobovici and their colleagues suggested that it could be interpreted as reading, "Divine Jehovah (Yahweh), lift up, lift up," or "The Divine Jehovah raises up from [the dead]." But Rollston said the first letter in the word that was said to refer to Jehovah — IAEO — looked like a T rather than an I.

"This can't be an iota," he told me, "and that's the one letter that has to be there."

He also questioned the interpretation of the inscription's key word, "UPsOO," or "hupso," which would be a form of the verb "to lift up." Even if one assumes that's what was intended, the word wouldn't necessarily refer to raising up in the resurrection sense, he said. And even if one assumes it was indeed meant as a reference to resurrection, there were some Jewish sects back then — such as the Pharisees — that believed in a general resurrection.

"For someone to state that this is an early Christian tomb, there really has to be some clear and decisive evidence to back up that statement," Rollston told me. "And it just really isn't here."

In a follow-up email, Tabor told me that the "tower will not float" as an alternate explanation for the fishlike image. He also pointed to the comments he posted on the ASOR Blog, taking further issue with the nephesh tower interpretation. In a comment addressed to Rollston, he said, "We have much to discuss, but I look forward to doing it face to face."

On the positive side...
Not every outside expert was totally critical: The Israeli newspaper Haaretz quoted Yuval Baruch, an archaeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, as saying that Tabor and Jacobovici may well be right about the fish. Baruch noted that the fishlike image was not photographed "in the best light," but added: "If it is indeed a fish, it is fantastic. It has no parallel."

Baruch cautioned against reading too much into a single decoration, however. "Different decorations are being discovered all the time," he told Haaretz.

Rollston and ASOR's Vaughn both said the robotic-arm exploration technique that Tabor and his colleagues used to explore the 1st-century tomb held promise for future digs. Israel's religious and civil authorities are reluctant to have ancient sites disturbed, and even if the excavations are approved, they can create huge disruptions for residential areas like the one where the tomb currently in question is located. Tabor and his colleagues circumvented many of those typical problems by using a camera-equipped robotic arm that they snaked down through a pipe going into the tomb.

"The robotic-arm technology used by James Tabor is truly amazing," Vaughn said. "To be able to explore in a relatively non-invasive way, and to respect the artifacts and bones that may be present there, is certainly of much value."

Magness, however, stressed in her blog posting that robotic-arm video couldn't take the place of a full-fledged dig.

"The archaeological endeavor involves piecing together all available information, not just one artifact taken out of context," she wrote. "Context is the reason that archaeologists go to so much trouble to document the provenance of every feature and artifact dug up on an excavation. The current claim is based on finds that have no context, as they have not been excavated. All we have are photos taken by a robotic arm of objects (or parts of objects), the dates and identification of which are unknown or unclear."

Rollston said further analysis could well shed more light on the central question raised by the current controversy: How did the first Christian communities emerge and manifest themselves? But the process of getting definitive answers doesn't necessarily match the typical time frame for a television production or book project.

"The wheels of scholarship, like the wheels of justice, grind slowly but surely," he told me.

More about biblical brouhahas:

• New find revives 'Jesus Tomb' flap
• Claims about tomb stir tempest
• Messianic message stirs debate
• Return to King Solomon's mines
• Help scientists decipher 'lost' gospel
• Gallery: The archaeology of Christianity
• Experts stumped by markings in Jerusalem

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

One of the designs etched on a bone box found within a 1st-century Jerusalem tomb suggests the biblical story of Jonah and the fish, which held significant symbolism for early Christians.

Using a remote-controlled camera on the end of a robotic arm, investigators have found what could be the earliest evidence of a Christian iconography in Jerusalem, engraved on a set of "bone boxes" inside a nearly intact 1st-century tomb.

One of the limestone boxes, known more formally as an ossuary, carries a Greek inscription calling on God to "rise up" or "raise up" someone. Another box appears to show the carved image of a fish, perhaps with the prophet Jonah in its mouth. Allusions to fish and the "sign of Jonah" came to be widely used among early Christians, but not among Jerusalem's Jews.

Update: Doubts raised about the 'Jesus Discovery'

Those discoveries alone would be enough to get biblical scholars excited. But the investigators in this case are the same people who claimed five years ago that ossuaries from a nearby tomb were engraved with the names of the biblical Jesus and his family. They're putting forth this new find as supporting evidence for their earlier claims, and resurrecting the topic in a newly published book ("The Jesus Discovery") as well as a Discovery Channel documentary that's due to air this spring.

"This does reopen the whole question about the 'Jesus Tomb,'" James Tabor, a scriptural scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told me.

That almost guarantees that the link to Jesus will take center stage once again in the discussion of the discovery, with most archaeologists discounting the connection. There's even a chance that the renewed controversy would push this most recent find out of the spotlight. That would be a terrible shame, said John Dominic Crossan, an expert on 1st-century Christianity and former Catholic priest who is a professor emeritus at DePaul University.

"It's a stunning discovery," he said. "It's a stunning piece of technology. As a scholar, I really don't want to get lost in saying, 'Oh, come on, it's off the wall.' Yeah, it's off the wall. But look at the wall!"

James Tabor / UNCC

Engineer Walter Klassen and filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici hold the camera-equipped robotic arm in its folded-up configuration.

Or in this case, look at the box.

How the boxes were found
Tabor and documentary filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici located both of the 1st-century tombs — the so-called Jesus Family Tomb as well as the one with the newly revealed inscriptions — in a Jerusalem neighborhood known as Talpiot years ago. They looked into previous claims that the bone boxes in the Jesus Family Tomb were marked with names that meshed with the names of Jesus' brothers and sisters, as mentioned in the Gospels. The investigators went on to cite a statistical analysis of name frequency as evidence that the family interred in the caskets was that of Jesus.

Most provocatively, they pointed to one box that was said to contain the remains of Jesus, and another containing the remains of "Judah, son of Jesus." These claims ran counter to the mainstream Christian view that Jesus made a bodily resurrection after his crucifixion and death, and that he did not marry or have children. To explain the seeming discrepancy with the Gospels, Tabor and his colleagues suggested that early Christians did not necessarily believe in a bodily resurrection, but rather a spiritual resurrection in which Jesus left behind the "old clothes" of the flesh.

The first book ("The Jesus Family Tomb") and TV documentary ("The Lost Tomb of Jesus") set off a wave of protests, with skeptics saying that Tabor and Jacobovici were sensationalizing an unprovable assertion. Despite the criticism, the team continued their work, focusing on the other tomb. This tomb was only briefly examined in 1981 before protests by Orthodox Jews, concerned about the disturbance of a gravesite, forced an end to the archaeological study. The tomb was sealed back up, and a condominium was built over it. Tabor and his colleagues refer to this tomb as the "Patio Tomb," because a patio sits almost directly above the tomb.

Israel's civil and religious authorities were resistant to efforts to reopen the Patio Tomb, so Tabor, Jacobovici and their colleagues came up with an unorthodox alternative: They suggested building a robotic arm that could be extended down vent holes and drill holes into the tomb, to a maximum length of more than 15 feet. The authorities gave their permission, and the documentary team proceeded with their remote-controlled video exploration in June 2010.

James Tabor / UNCC

Investigators shot imagery of the 1st-century Jerusalem tomb and the bone boxes inside the tomb using a robotic arm, as shown in this video frame.

The filmmakers peered into niches cut into the tomb and found several inscribed bone boxes, including one that was left ajar to reveal the bones still within. In one of the niches, two boxes were jammed close together. As the robotic arm maneuvered to look at the side of one of the boxes, one of the investigators cried out, "Wait, wait, stop there!" A design had been etched into the limestone — a design that could be interpreted as a fish with a stick figure hanging out of its mouth.

The meaning of the inscriptions
After consulting with other scriptural experts, the investigators concluded that the etching showed a representation of Jonah and the fish. The biblical tale of the prophet who was swallowed by a giant fish, only to be vomited up alive three days later, had a special resonance for early Christians, who believed in Jesus' resurrection after three days in a tomb. The image of the fish, which would not typically be carved on a Jewish ossuary, suggested to Tabor and his colleagues that this might be the earliest surviving example of a Christian marking on an artifact in Jerusalem.

The team's excitement grew when they saw the inscription on the box sitting next to the one with the fish: A four-line inscription in Greek appeared to refer to a belief in the resurrection. The inscription could be read as "Divine Jehovah, raise up, raise up," or "The Divine Jehovah raises up to the Holy Place," or "Divine Jehovah, raise up [abbreviated name]."

"This inscription has something to do with resurrection of the dead, either of the deceased in the ossuary, or perhaps, given the Jonah image nearby, an expression of faith in Jesus' resurrection," Tabor said in a news release.

The Jesus connection
Tabor and his colleagues tie this latest discovery to their earlier claims by suggesting that the two tombs were part of one complex, which might have been chiseled out by a wealthy supporter of Jesus and his disciples. They even name their prime suspect: Joseph of Arimathea, a high-ranking religious official who was said in the Gospels to have arranged Jesus' burial. In the investigators' view, the fact that they found such a strong connection to early Christianity in the Patio Tomb strengthens their original claims for the Jesus Family Tomb, which is 200 feet away.

"We now have the new archaeological evidence, literally written in stone, that can guide us in properly understanding what Jesus' earliest followers meant by their faith in Jesus' resurrection from the dead — with his earthly remains, and those of his family, peacefully interred just yards away," Tabor and Jacobovici wrote.

Crossan said that was too much of a leap. "There's nothing that associates [the Patio Tomb] with Joseph of Arimathea," he said.

He said the two tombs may well have no relationship to each other: "This whole area is riddled with tombs, as far as we can tell."

Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary, voiced a similar view. "The attempt to connect [the Patio Tomb] to the other tombs is sheer conjecture, unless the tombs were connected," he told me.

Witherington said the connections made in the newly published book were similar to those put forth in Tabor's earlier work. "Most of us who have evaluated his work would say, OK, all very interesting, but it's building one speculation on another speculation," he said.

However, Witherington was intrigued by the fish carving. "We have early Christian ossuaries with the fish symbol ... in the 2nd century, if not back into the 1st century," he said. "That is the early Christian symbol for I-Ch-Th-Y-S ... 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.' What we don't have any evidence for is that symbol on Jewish ossuaries."

The words of the inscription also caught Witherington's interest. "They imply a belief about the resurrection," he said.

It is thought that the use of such bone boxes in Jerusalem ceased in the year 70, due to the Roman destruction of the city. Thus, there's a chance that the residents buried in the Patio Tomb actually lived during the time of Jesus and his first disciples. However, Crossan noted that Christians weren't the only ones in 1st-century Jerusalem who held a religious belief in resurrection. The Pharisees and the Essenes also looked forward to the resurrection of the righteous, he said.

"What I would say is ... this is a rich Pharisee, a rich person in the 1st century who believes in the resurrection," Crossan told me. "We always thought that [the image of] Jonah coming out of the fish was peculiarly Christian. Maybe that's one more thing that the early Christians took from Jewish tradition, and this would be the first evidence."

More about biblical archaeology:

• Messianic message stirs debate
• Return to King Solomon's mines
• Help scientists decipher 'lost' gospel
• Gallery: The archaeology of Christianity
• Experts stumped by markings in Jerusalem
• Claims about Jesus' 'lost tomb' stir up tempest

An academic paper on the Patio Tomb project is being posted to The Bible and Interpretation on Tuesday, and Tabor says the paper will be submitted for print publication as well. A press event about the project and the Discovery Channel documentary has been scheduled for 11 a.m. ET Tuesday at Discovery Times Square in New York City. Funding for the project was provided by Discovery Channel / Vision Television / Associated Producers. Tabor's colleague in obtaining the excavation license from the Israel Antiquities Authority was Rami Arav, professor of archaeology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

This temple in the Kingdom of Tikal is one of the most prominent of the Classic Maya Period.

Scientists have long assumed that the Classic Maya civilization was done in more than a millennium ago by a series of droughts, but now they say natural records suggest those droughts were "modest," with no more than a 40 percent reduction in rainfall. And that, in turn, suggests that similarly modest climate changes over the next century could have a not-so-modest effect.

"What seems like a minor reduction in water availability may lead to important, long-lasting problems ... Today, we have the benefit of awareness, and we should act accordingly," Martin Medina-Elizalde, a researcher at the Yucatan Center for Scientific Research in Mexico, said in a news release.

The study — conducted by Medina-Elizalde and Eelco Rohling, a colleague from the University of Southampton — appears in this week's issue of the journal Science. It addresses one of the big mysteries of Maya history: What caused a civilization that dominated areas of present-day Guatemala and Mexico in the year 800 to collapse by the year 1000? Deforestation and drought have figured prominently as the prime suspects, but just how dire did those droughts get?

To shed additional light on the mystery, the two climate experts analyzed chemicals in lake sediments, marine shells and cave stalagmites to track variations in rainfall. For example, the ratio of oxygen-16 to oxygen-18 in a particular layer of mineral can tell you how much rainfall fell during the season when the mineral was laid down. Such variations can be read year by year, like tree rings.

Science / AAAS

The elements in different layers of stalagmites in Yucatan Peninsula caves, such as this one, were analyzed to determine how rainfall varied through the centuries.

The researchers found that there was indeed a deficit in rainfall in the period between the years 800 and 1000. But that deficit was modest, amounting to a 25 to 40 percent reduction in the drought years. Medina-Elizalde and Rohling assume that the droughts took the form of reductions in the frequency and intensity of tropical storms during the summer.

"Summer was the main season for cultivation and replenishment of Mayan freshwater storage systems, and there are no rivers in the Yucatan lowlands," Rohling said in the news release. "Societal disruptions and abandonment of cities are likely consequences of critical water shortages, especially because there seems to have been a rapid repetition of multiyear droughts."

In an email, Medina-Elizalde told me that "these droughts may not have been strong enough to cause by themselves the collapse of the civilization, but they were likely strong enough and persistent enough ... to cause major sociopolitical disruptions that ultimately led to the final outcome."

"Let's imagine that today, from one year to another, major cities can no longer supply fresh water to a third of their populations. ... With no freshwater pumping systems, how would we keep producing agricultural produce and supplying fresh water to support the entire populations of these cities?" he wrote.

Today, much of the Yucatan Peninsula's rural population still relies on summer rainfall to support their crops. Medina-Elizalde said access to fresh water isn't so much of a problem, thanks to modern pumping systems. But he noted that lower-than-average summer rains still "have fairly dire consequences" for local farmers.

The current models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that there could be annual rainfall reductions of up to 50 percent in the Yucatan Peninsula by the end of this century, Medina-Elizalde said. He and his colleagues are studying how such reductions might affect freshwater supplies in the region.

"Some climate models suggest that local vegetation does contribute to increase rainfall significantly ... which would suggest that by preserving the forests, we are mitigating the impacts of climate change," he said. "Definitely, local governments need to start making serious efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change in light of the forecast for the next decades."

What do you think? Does this research merely add an interesting twist on a centuries-old story, or does it serve as a warning about our future fate? Please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about climate and ancient civilizations:

• How climate change kills societies
• Ancient city survived as civilizations collapsed
• Mystery behind Khmer civilization's ruin revealed
• Will climate change change us?

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or following the Cosmic Log Google+ page. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Stanford University

A researcher sounds a note on a conch-shell trumpet as part of an experiment to re-create the ceremonial calls heard by ancient Andeans in the Chavin de Huantar ceremonial center in Peru.

Ancient peoples around the world seem to have designed their sacred spaces not only for ceremonial sights, but for ceremonial sounds as well, archaeologists say.

In Peru, for example, a 3,000-year-old Andean ceremonial center's design was optimized for the blare of a priest's conch-shell trumpet. In Mexico, the Chichen Itza temple site features a staircase that can make hand claps sound like the chirp of a quetzal bird. And one of the best-known ancient monuments of all, England's Stonehenge, has a layout that's acoustically pleasing as well as astronomically significant.

The big question is, did ancient societies really have acoustics in mind when they built their monuments?

"That is a challenge," said David Lubman, a California-based acoustical scientist and consultant. Much of the evidence is circumstantial, or based on interpretations of ancient myths. But when the acoustical resonances fit so well with the purpose of a ceremonial space, it's hard to resist making a connection.

"Whether or not you have historical evidence, you have another form of evidence," said Miriam Kolar, a researcher at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

Theater for the ears
Researchers discussed their efforts to unravel the mysteries of ancient acoustics today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Vancouver, British Columbia.

For the past few years, Kolar and her colleagues have been focusing on Chavin de Huantar, a pre-Inca site in Peru that served as a regional religious center. People apparently came to a circular plaza to worship, and to hear an oracle's pronouncements issuing from a stone gallery.

The Stanford team conducted a detailed acoustical study of the gallery's cross-shaped passageways. They found that the central duct between the gallery and the plaza would serve as an acoustic filter system, accentuating the tones produced by the priests' ceremonial conch trumpets, known as "pututus."

"There was theater going on," Kolar said. The thrilling effect of the trumpet calls and the oracle's words may well have been heightened by the psychoactive effects of the San Pedro cactus that the Chavin people consumed during their rituals.

The chirping staircase
There are theatrical touches as well at Chichen Itza, a Maya temple complex going back more than 1,000 years, Lubman said. One of the most prominent monuments is the Temple of Kukulkan, also known as El Castillo: Some researchers have argued that the temple's staircase was constructed so as to create a "feathered serpent" shadow during the spring and autumn equinoxes. Lubman says the staircase can produce an aural as well as a visual effect: When you clap your hands at just the right spot, the echo comes back sounding much like the chirp of the quetzal bird, which was sacred to the Maya.

The acoustician played an audio clip demonstrating that the bird's chirp and the clap's echo sounded remarkably similar. He speculated that a priest might have clapped his hands loudly to seek counsel from a quetzal. Worshipers would have been impressed to hear the chirp of a spectral bird, apparently coming from inside the temple. "Only priests were trained to interpret what the quetzal said," Lubman said, half-jokingly.

Lubman has been studying Chichen Itza's acoustics for more than a decade. That's such a long time that the quetzal research "should be old news," he said. "But the darn bird keeps chirping." He noted that Chichen Itza has another interesting acoustic feature: Its ball court is designed like a "whispering gallery," so that a low utterance in one corner of the court could be heard clearly in another corner.

The bottom line? Maybe the ancient Maya were more in tune with sacred sounds than we are today. "Now, many things go through our eyes before they get to our minds, but that wasn't true in the ancient world," he said.

The Stone Age and Stonehenge
Steven Waller, a researcher at California-based Rock Art Acoustics, theorized that acoustics may even have had something to do with the placement of the stones at Stonehenge, a monument that's at least 5,000 years old. "What struck me was that the layout of Stonehenge reminded me of an interference pattern," he told his AAAS audience.

Waller said he was even more intrigued when he considered the legends of ancient Britain. One legend suggests that Stonehenge was created when two pipers lured maidens into a circle with their magic tunes, and then turned them into standing stones. He noted that some of Stonehenge's monoliths are sometimes called "piper stones."

Could ancient acoustics have been behind some of these legends? To find out, Waller conducted an experiment in which he put blindfolds on experimental subjects and had them walk around an open field in a circle while two flutes played an identical tone (1100 Hz, or C-sharp). The sound waves from the two flutes interfered with each other in such a way that the sound alternated between loud and soft in different locations. When the walkers were asked to map out the area, they came up with a pattern of obstacles and archways much like an ancient stone circle.

"It's as if there was something blocking the sound ... a ring of invisible objects, massive objects, blocking the sound," he said.

Waller also analyzed the placements of stones at Stonehenge and other neolithic stone circles, and found the acoustic parallel he was looking for. "The pillars actually cast acoustic patterns that mirror an interference pattern," he said.

The leading hypothesis about Stonehenge is that it served as a religious center that was laid out to mark the astronomical alignments for Earth's seasons, and Waller doesn't take issue with that. "My theory doesn't necessarily conflict with the solar alignment theory," he said. But is there any evidence to show that Stonehenge's designers really did have acoustics in mind? Waller can only point to the circumstantial connections — for example, the fact that cave paintings were often put in the locations that had the best acoustics for ceremonies, or the fact that some ancient peoples thought echoes emanated from spirits inside stones.

"They didn't know about sound waves reflecting," he said.

Waller said the important thing is to be mindful of the contributions that acoustics can make to the study of sacred spaces. Some of those spaces are already in danger of disappearing. For example, Waller worried that some of the modern-day renovations aimed at making cave paintings in France more accessible to tourists may actually destroy the acoustic qualities that led the painters to those spots in the first place.

"Nobody has been paying attention to the sounds," he said. "We've been destroying the sounds."

More about the sounds of science:

• It turns out that cavemen loved to sing
• Was Stonehenge inspired by a sound illusion?
• Stonehenge: Totally awesome place for raves
• Researchers re-create scary pre-Columbian sounds
• Acoustic archaeology yields mind-tripping tricks
• Listen to the sounds of science

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman via RCMS

A codex-style flask from Mexico, dated to the year 700, bears Mayan hieroglyphics reading "y-otoot 'u-may," translated as "the home of its/his/her tobacco."

Researchers have identified traces of nicotine inside a 1,300-year-old Mayan flask, confirming the vessel's ancient use and providing the earliest chemical evidence of tobacco in Maya culture.

There's been ample evidence from textual and pictorial sources that the Maya smoked tobacco. For example, at Mexico's Palenque archaeological site, one of the carved stone panels at the Temple of the Cross shows a man smoking what appears to be an ornate pipe.

Other evidence suggests that the Maya and other ancient Mesoamerican cultures smoked tobacco either in pipes or in cigar-type bundles. The sacred text of the Quiche Maya, the Popol Vuh, says the story's two heroes were once required to keep their cigars lit all night in a cave of darkness — but fooled the people of the underworld by putting fireflies on the ends of their cigars instead. Spaniards who came in contact with the Maya in the 16th century reported seeing the natives puffing on cigars.

This week's research, published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, is the first to link tobacco's active ingredient with a vessel labeled as containing the goods, according to Dmitri Zagorevski, a biochemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman, an archaeologist at the University of Albany in New York.

Zagorevski and Loughmiller-Newman analyzed samples taken from a Mayan flask that was made in Mexico's southern Campeche state and became part of the Library of Congress' Kislak Collection. The flask has been dated to around the year 700, during the Late Classic Maya period (A.D. 600-900). It is marked with Mayan hieroglyphs reading "y-otoot 'u-may," which is translated as "the house of its/his/her tobacco."

The researchers detected traces of nicotine in the samples using gas-chromatography mass spectrometry and liquid-chromatography mass spectrometry. That confirmed that the flask actually housed someone's tobacco.

"Investigation of food items consumed by ancient people offers insight into the traditions and customs of a particular civilization," Loughmiller-Newman explained in a news release. "Textual evidence written on pottery is often an indicator of contents or of an intended purpose; however, actual usage of a container could be altered or falsely represented."

She and Zagorevski said chemical analysis has been used only once before to confirm the contents of a Mayan vessel labeled with hieroglyphics. That case, reported more than 20 years ago, involved the confirmation that a vessel contained cacao through the detection of caffeine and an alkaloid known as theobromine.

The researchers said recovering food residues for analysis is a "very difficult task" for several reasons, including the fact that ancient vessels may contain other substances in addition to the stuff being sought. For example, most of the Kislak Collection's flasks were filled with reddish iron oxide for burial rituals, making it harder to determine what the vessels originally held.

"Our study provides rare evidence of the intended use of an ancient container," Zagorevski said in the news release, issued today. "Mass spectrometry has proven to be an invaluable method of analysis of organic residues in archaeological artifacts. This discovery is not only significant to understanding Mayan hieroglyphics, but an important archaeological application of chemical detection." 

Extra credit: This research was originally due for public release on Thursday, but the embargo was lifted after the news release popped up on The Tree of Life blog as part of a protest by UC-Davis biologist Jonathan Eisen against "press release spam." The episode has sparked a discussion of press embargoes on Ivan Oransky's Embargo Watch. Meanwhile, Loughmiller-Newman and Zagorevski have promised to get back to me with additional comments on the research, and I'll add those comments to this posting as they come in.

Update for 8 p.m. ET: Loughmiller-Newman tells me that the tobacco in the flask might not have been used for smoking. "It's a very small container," she said. "My guess is that it would have been used for treatment of bug bites, or to ward off snakes, or perhaps as a snuff."

She explained that the Maya used tobacco in its powdered form as a snake repellent ("It 'burns' them on their body beneath their scales") and to combat botfly larvae ("One way to suffocate the larvae and keep them from growing is to put powdered tobacco on ths skin"). The powder could also be snorted like snuff, or added to alcoholic drinks for an extra kick.

"This was very strong tobacco, much stronger than it is today," she said. "Nicotiana rustica was nearly hallucinogenic."

Like, wow.

More about ancient drugs:

• Gallery: Good times in ancient times
• Eight ancient drinks uncorked by science
• World's oldest pot stash totally busted
• Mesopotamian tales tell of tavern etiquette
• Did beer lubricate the rise of civilization?
• Murals reveal how the ancient Maya lived

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Lefteris Pitarakis / AP

People raise their hands in meditation during the 2010 summer solstice at Stonehenge.

Researchers say they've found two pits to the east and west of Stonehenge that may have played a role in an ancient midsummer ceremony. The discovery suggests that the 5,000-year-old circle of stones we see today may represent just a few of the pieces in a larger geographical, astronomical and cultural puzzle.

The previously undetected pits could provide clues for solving the puzzle.

"These exciting finds indicate that even though Stonehenge was ultimately the most important monument in the landscape, it may at times not have been the only, or most important ritual focus, and the area of Stonehenge may have become significant as a sacred site at a much earlier date," Vince Gaffney, an archaeology professor at the University of Birmingham, said in a news release issued over the weekend.

The pits, which measure about 16 feet (5 meters wide) and at least 3 feet (1 meter) deep, have been covered over for centuries and can't easily be spotted on the ground. But they showed up in a survey that was conducted using non-invasive mapping techniques such as ground-penetrating radar and magnetometry. The survey is part of the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project, which was initiated last year with backing from the University of Birmingham's IBM Visual and Spatial Technology Center and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna.

The placement of the pits is intriguing: They were found on the eastern and western sides of the Cursus, a racetrack-style enclosure north of Stonehenge itself that spans 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) from east to west and is up to 100 yards (meters) wide. From the perspective of an observer standing at the Heel Stone, a massive upright stone just outside Stonehenge's main circle, the sun would rise just above the eastern pit on the day of the summer solstice, which is the longest day of the year. The same observer would see the sun set that evening in line with the western pit.

National Geographic

A map of the Stonehenge area shows the placement of the stone circle and the Cursus, as well as another monument known as Woodhenge and a suggested ceremonial route between the monuments.

Archaeologists have previously noted that the Cursus was apparently created several hundred years before Stonehenge's 5,000-year-old stone circle was erected. The newly detected pits may have been part of a grand layout that guided the placement of the standing stones.

But to what end?

Gaffney, who led the survey project, speculated that the Cursus was the central stage for a midsummer ritual that was enacted long before Stonehenge's heyday. "The perimeter of the Cursus may well have defined a route guiding ceremonial processions which took place on the longest day of the year," he said.

In addition to the pits, Gaffney and his colleagues found a previously undetected gap in the middle of the northern side of the eroded earthwork that defines the sides of the Cursus. They propose that ceremonial leaders entered the Cursus through that gap, and then gathered at the eastern pit to conduct sunrise rituals. Over the course of the day, participants in the rituals might have made their way westward, ending up at the western pit at sunset.

"Observers of the ceremony would have been positioned at the Heel Stone, [with] which the two pits are aligned," Gaffney said.

Henry Chapman, another archaeologist at the University of Birmingham, said Stonehenge's position would have added to the symbolism. "If you measure the walking distance between the two pits, the procession would reach exactly halfway at midday, when the sun would be directly on top of Stonehenge," he said in the news release. "This is more than just coincidence, indicating that the exact length of the Cursus and the positioning of the pits are of significance."

The researchers suggested that the pits may have contained tall sighting stones, or wooden posts, or even fires to symbolize the sun. Just imagine how it would feel to watch the sun rise from a fire lit before dawn, follow its movement across the sky in time with a daylong procession, and then see it fall into the flames at sunset.

"Stonehenge may have been emerging as an important area for quite a long time, and sometimes you can't necessarily see that in the standing archaeology," Gaffney said in an MP3 podcast provided by the University of Birmingham. "The stones themselves, which are generally later, don't give you that information. You have to infer it from relationships between multiple monuments."

The researchers aren't anywhere close to finishing the puzzle: Gaffney figures there's at least another two years' worth of survey work to do. Even then, the full story of Stonehenge and its environs may remain wrapped in mystery. How much can stones and earth tell? Stay tuned ...

More about Stonehenge:

• Did Stonehenge start out as a cemetery?
• ... Or was it a place of healing?
• Gallery: Secrets of Stonehenge
• Gallery: Seven mysteries of archaeology

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.