Takeshi Inomata

Workers stand on Platform A-24 at the Ceibal archaeological site in Guatemala. Archaeologists say the dig revealed the oldest monumental construction in the Maya lowlands.

Archaeologists say that ceremonial structures unearthed in Guatemala are centuries older than they expected — and that the findings point to new theories for the rise of Maya culture.

"The origin of Maya civilization was more complex than previously thought," the University of Arizona's Takeshi Inomata, lead researcher for a study appearing in this week's issue of the journal Science, told reporters on Thursday. Even though all this happened 3,000 years ago, the findings could provide fresh insights about social change in general, he said.

The Maya had their heyday in Mexico and Central America between the year 250 and 900, but the roots of their culture go much farther back. There are several schools of thought about how their distinctive culture arose: Some archaeologists say the central features of Maya cultural life, including grand ceremonies centered on broad plazas and pyramids, were borrowed from Mexico's older Olmec civilization. Others say those features arose internally, without much outside influence.

Inomata said the excavations at Ceibal, in Guatemala's Maya lowlands, suggest a more complicated scenario. Over the course of seven years, he and his colleagues dug down more than 50 feet, analyzed the layers of sediment, and did scores of radiocarbon-dating tests to trace the evolution of Ceibal's structures. They concluded that Ceibal's Maya rulers started building ceremonial plazas and platforms around 1000 B.C., and had turned those structures into a central pyramid and plaza by 800 B.C. 

That would mean Ceibal's residents were developing the architectural and religious hallmarks of Maya society before the first appearance of those hallmarks in Olmec society, at La Venta, hundreds of miles away on Mexico's Gulf Coast. La Venta's ceremonial structures have been dated to about 800 B.C.

Science / AAAS

Ceibal lies in Guatemala's Maya lowlands. The Olmec centers of San Lorenzo and La Venta were hundreds of miles away, in Mexico. Researchers say Ceibal also was influenced by other communities in central Chiapas and along the Pacific coast.

Other Maya settlements were building such structures around that same time, although they weren't as developed as Ceibal's. A wide spectrum of Mesoamerican communities — for example, settlements in central Chiapas and those on the southern Pacific coast — may have had a lot of important interactions with Ceibal and other communities in the Maya lowland during this period, Inomata said.

He stressed that the Olmec almost certainly influenced Maya culture during the centuries that predated Ceibal's rise. For example, there's evidence that an Olmec center near San Lorenzo was dominant well before Ceibal's residents began building their ritual structurs. However, Inomata said, "San Lorenzo didn't have the kind of ceremonial complexes that we're talking about."

The period from 1000 and 800 B.C. appears to have been a key turning point for Maya culture. There may have been a "power vacuum" between the fall of San Lorenzo and the rise of La Venta that gave early Maya communities the opportunity to experiment and develop cultural innovations, Inomata said. "We are looking at major change in this period, and that happened really in the absence of a very strong Olmec center," he told reporters.

The construction of Ceibal's ceremonial complexes would have required the participation of the whole community, said the University of Arizona's Daniela Triadan, who is a co-author of the Science paper as well as Inomata's wife. "Some people might already have had a special position in the community, and they were most certainly people with specialized ritual knowledge. This indicates that the transition from a mobile hunter-gatherer and horticultural lifestyle to permanently settled agriculturalists was rapid," she said.

What drove that rapid change? The research team is still looking into potential environmental factors, but Inomata speculated that the cultivation of maize — that is, corn — may have been decisive. "There may have been a major increase in maize production, which may have been a threshold in terms of the development of cultural elements," he said.

"This is not just a study about this specific civilization," Inomata told reporters. "We also want to think about how human societies change, and how human civilization developed. What we are seeing here is that major renovation and change can happen through the interaction of various groups. It doesn't have to come from powerful, major political centers. That's one important implication that we are getting."

More about the Olmec and the Maya:

• Olmec influence stretched hundreds of miles
• Maya doom teaches climate lesson
• Cosmic Log archive on Maya culture

In addition to Inomata and Triadan, the authors of "Early Ceremonial Constructions at Ceibal, Guatemala, and the Origins of Lowland Maya Civilization" include Kazuo Aoyama, Victor Castillo and Hitoshi Yonenobu.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Patrick Aventurier / Getty Images

Camera crews from all over the world continue to work Friday beyond 11:11 a.m., the time the Mayan apocalypse was supposed to occur in Bugarach village, France.

BUGARACH, France — The peacefulness of the Sals River Valley at the foothills of the Pyrenees in France belies its violent, enigmatic history. Once the place of ancient marauding Visigoths, its small villages were also home to the mystical Cathars and to the protectors of the cloth, the Knights Templar – both eliminated by inquisitions and despotic rulers.

Roughly two years ago, the peace of this land was broken once again by strange rumors surfacing online about Bugarach Mountain, a rocky beacon presiding over the landscape.

According to some reports, the peak of the mountain conceals an alien spaceship. Other sources say it is part of an alien space-time portal. The origins of the UFO stories have been difficult to trace, but have generated a response bordering on hysteria. Under normal circumstances, probably, such bizarre claims would have slunk away unnoticed or been relegated to the crazy bin. But, as they say, timing is everything.

For years, doomsayers warned that the end of a 5,125-year cycle in the Maya timekeeping system, which culminated on Dec. 21, would also signify the end of the world. In recent months, the UFO story has taken over the public imagination. Instead of being passed off as nonsense, Bugarach and its "resident UFO" became star European players in a global doomsday pantomime. And when it was announced that the regional authorities were calling in police and paramilitaries to prevent cultists from ascending the peak on doomsday, the village became the center of a media storm — a different kind of pantomime altogether.

Driving into the village on the morning of Dec. 19, a number of elements met the eyes: telltale blue uniforms and police vans peppering the sides of the roads, smoke rising languidly from stone chimneys, the looming figure of Bugarach Mountain. Other sights included columns of SUVs and satellite trucks snaking their way along the country roads. Roving packs of groomed-yet-rugged types with press passes and hungry looks were busy claiming positions within cordoned-off areas in the village.

No sight of cultists, or for that matter, anything more otherworldly than a mass of waterproof jackets and the hardened boots of teams waiting for their scoop. Soggy fields bordered with caution tape were reserved for vehicles, and over the course of the day the fields became emblazoned with acronyms and company crests, resembling an army of knights from different royal houses, awaiting battle.

Optimism reigned for the two days leading up to the eschatological event. Reporters heartily greeted each other and rival camera crews were sportingly scoped out. At dinner, the catch phrase, "Where are you from?" echoed around as different teams sat side by side at long tables, rubbing elbows and even sharing a bit of rustic bread. A cacophony of tongues filled the room. Outside, the village remained strangely empty.

Dawn breaks on Dec. 21 in Bugarach. Where are all the hippies? A Dutch producer mutters: "Maybe they’ve already crossed through the star gate." Most likely, they’ve been chased away.

"Anyway, who the heck would want to ride to another planet with this bunch?" NBC News overhears a French cameraman saying to his sound technician as he looks around the square.

Guillaume Horcajuelo / EPA

An unidentified woman speaks to journalists in the village of Bugarach in southern France on Dec. 21.

The few locals venturing out in the open are either bemused and vague, or are capitalizing on all the attention to make some cash — steaming croissants and chai tea are sold at a makeshift stall. The clientele? Dutch, French and Japanese TV crews. A young video artist from Switzerland takes a photo of a photographer taking a photo of reporters.

"This is very postmodern," he laughs. "This is the new story."

From time to time, rogue civilians break the fatigue that's setting in. A man arrives carrying a placard with the words, "The black stone of Bugarach." In an instant, he is mobbed by TV crews. Later, an angry resident shouts at the throng. Lenses swing and snap wildly.

Author Henry Lincoln accuses the media of creating and hyping the story.

"You’re doing it," he told NBC News. "If you would leave us in peace, nobody would be yelling about the end of the world and flying saucers coming to Bugarach."

Fair enough, this once sleepy town has been invaded. Neither by UFOs nor by extremists of any sort, but rather by dogged pursuers of what has proven to be an elusive story.

At what point does a reporter abandon a story? "Let’s get out of here. This is embarrassing," a correspondent states flatly.

Almost reluctantly, engines begin to start.

Guillaume Horcajuelo / EPA

Two men dressed in tin foil stand in the village as authorities block access to the peak of Bugarach in southern France on Dec. 21.

More world stories from NBC News:

• Engel, NBC crew believed they wouldn't leave Syria alive
• UN calls for ban on 'grotesque practice' of female genital mutilation
• Video: Syrian refugees speak out on the nightmare of exodus
• UFO lovers, light-seekers and lawyers await Maya end of days
• Rumors of plot to sterilize Muslims spark Pakistan killings
• Video: It's so cold in Siberia, boiling water freezes
• 'Doomsday' prompts jokes, mass arrests in China

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

Hector Retamal / AFP - Getty Images

Guatemalan Mayan natives take part in celebrations marking the end of the Maya age at the Tikal archaeological site on Friday.

The sun has arisen today at Maya monuments in Mexico and Guatemala, heralding the completion of a 144,000-day calendar cycle — but not the end of the world.

Most archaeologists say the ancient Maya regarded sunrise as the signal for the turnover, much as we regard midnight on New Year's Eve as the time to party. And sure enough, tourists as well as modern-day Maya in traditional garb gathered at Chichen Itza's El Castillo pyramid in Mexico to greet the day. Josh Gates, host of the Syfy TV show "Destination Truth," is live-tweeting the activities. (Syfy is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns NBC News Digital.)

The ancient Maya calendar marks Dec. 21 as the end of a cycle known as a baktun, which lasts 144,000 days or nearly 400 years. This finishes up the 13th baktun since Year Zero for the Maya, and taken together, all that time represents an even longer 5,125-year cycle of creation. That led to speculation that the Maya expected the gods to reset the cosmos on Dec. 21. Somehow that speculation was taken seriously enough to whip up this whole end-of-the-world hype.

Along the way, all sorts of claims were made about unseen planets, solar disturbances and other supposed earth changes that would make today a very bad day. But judging from the pictures coming from Chichen Itza and other Maya monuments, people are having a good time today.

In the longer term, Maya community leaders hope all the attention they're getting this week will translate into a wider awareness of their ancient culture and their modern-day challenges. They're not worried about doomsday; they're worried about poverty. Check out this PhotoBlog posting for more about the real concerns being voiced by the indigenous people of Guatemala.

More about 2012:

• Solstice time, and all is well
• The Maya calendar's Big Day dawns
• Why NASA jumped the gun on doomsday
• Doomsday hot spots around the globe
• Video: 'We're very respectful of traditions'
• Cosmic Log archive on 2012 and doomsday fears

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

After years of claptrap about the Maya apocalypse on 12/21/12, the Big Day has dawned in many parts of the world. It's daytime in China, one of the world's hot spots for doomsday angst. So far, no solar flares have fried the earth, and no mountains have fallen into the sea. The sun will soon rise on Mexico's ancient Maya monuments, where thousands are gathering to greet a new era.

Then what?

"I don't think there's going to be a herd of jaguars descending from the heavens," said John Henderson, an anthropologist at Cornell University who specializes in the Maya world.

Archaeologists and astronomers have thoroughly debunked everything about the doomsday myth: The Maya never expected that the world would end when their Long Count calendar rolled over to the next 144,000-day cycle in 2012. Earth's magnetic field is not going haywire. There's no threat from the Large Hadron Collider, or the sun, or unseen planets, or the galactic plane.

More: Keep up to date on non-doomsday

Not everything about the Big Day is doom and gloom: Tourists and New Age types have flocked to the Maya ruins of Chichen Itza to greet Friday's dawn and the start of a new age with rituals old and new. "There is an explosion of consciousness through this," a gray-haired Californian musician named Shambala Songstar told Reuters. "We are becoming billionaires of energy. Opening to receive more light and more joy."

Minu Nair, a 27-year-old tourist from India, joked about the doomsday connection after hiking up to the top of the Maya pyramid at Coba, about an hour's drive from Chichen Itza. "At least we can die saying we saw the end of the world," he said with a laugh.

But not everything is sweetness and light, either. "We have to beware of mass psychosis," said Mexico's best-known soothsayer, Antonio Vazquez Alba. According to The Associated Press, Vazquez warned his followers to stay away from mass gatherings on Friday, out of concern about stampedes — or even mass suicides "of the kind we’ve seen before."

More: The scene at Chichen Itza

Victor Ruiz Garcia / Reuters

A man in a warrior costume dances in front of the Pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza in Mexico on Thursday.

Hector Retamal / AFP - Getty Images

A member of a folklore group places a Maya mask on his head in front of the Gran Jaguar temple in the Tikal archaeological site, north of Guatemala City.

Hector Retamal / AFP - Getty Images

A member of a folk group performs wearing a Maya mask at the Tikal archaeological site.

Orlando Sierra / AFP - Getty Images

Guatemalan shaman Christian Nottbohn conducts a Maya ceremony in Rastrajon, which was once a settlement for warriors tasked with protecting the ancient city of Copan in present-day Honduras.

Elsewhere, more than 1,000 members of Church of Almighty God were reportedly detained in China for spreading doomsday rumors. Hundreds more were heading for Serbia's Mount Rtanj and the French town of Bugarach, in search of a haven from the apocalypse. Authorities in Argentina limited access to a mountain called Cerro Uritorco after rumors spread about a plan for "massive spiritual suicide." In Michigan, dozens of schools were shut down early, partly because of end-of-the-world worries stoked by the Maya hype.

More: Rumors lead to school closures in Michigan

What would the ancient Maya think? "The Maya thought about everything in terms of cycles," Henderson told NBC News today. "Some may have expected the gods to fine-tune their creation of humanity. But others may have taken it more as an occasion to contemplate whether they were the kind of people they ought to be. And we can take it in the same way."

Think of it as the opportunity for New Year's Resolutions — or, in this case, New Baktun's Resolutions.

The Maya Long Count calendar divides time into a series of periods, building up to a cycle called the baktun that lasts 144,000 days, or a little more than 394 years. Dec. 21 marks the completion of 13 baktuns, which the Maya saw as a full cycle of creation. In some texts, the end of the 13th baktun — 13.0.0.0.0, in numerical notation — was used to refer to a long, long time.

"It would be like you and I saying, 'George Washington was such a great leader for us that we'll still be talking about him in the year 3000,'" said Walter Witschey, an anthropologist and Maya expert at Longwood University in Virginia.

But the Maya never thought time stopped in 2012 — or the year 3000, for that matter. A recently discovered Maya workshop demonstrated that calendar-makers contemplated time frames well beyond 2012, and the longest Maya calendar cycle, the alautun, goes out about 63 million years.

More: How the Maya calendar works

The concept of a Maya apocalypse appears to date to the 1960s: That was when anthropologist Michael Coe wrote a book speculating that the Maya saw the final day of the 13th baktun as the time for an "Armageddon" that would overtake all creation. Over the years, that idea became wrapped up with Christian ideas about the end times.

"So much of this Maya calendar fascination plays to very natural human tendencies to look for sources of information about the future, right?" said Loa Traxler, an archaeologist who is the curator of a "Maya 2012" exhibit at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. "When you add to that a lot of opinions that would point us to the end of days, and events of great reckoning, and destruction as the opening chapter of great change ... those are trends that play very strongly in modern society."

Some cultures get more concerned about it than others. In May, an international public opinion survey conducted by Ipsos for Reuters found that 20 percent of the Chinese respondents agreed that the Maya calendar would mark the end of the world. About 12 percent of the U.S. respondents felt that way, compared with only 4 percent in Germany.

Traxler said she encountered several well-educated people who asked her serious questions about the 2012 Maya apocalypse during a cruise through the Mediterranean in 2009. "It caught me by surprise," she said.

Her experience on that cruise was one of the reasons why she went to work on the "Maya 2012" exhibit, which tells the full story about the ancient Maya and their attentiveness to the cycles of time. "It has been quite an amazing adventure over the last several months," she said. "People have decided to make hay out of this."

More: In Maya doomsday, marketers see $$$

So when exactly does it stop? The consensus view among archaeologists is that the 13th baktun will end, and the 14th will begin, at sunrise Friday. "That would be sunrise in the Maya world, not in Beijing," Henderson joked.

But Witschey said there's still a bit of uncertainty about how the dates are calculated. "Most scholars would agree that we have a match within about three or four days," he said. "That means that the rollover of cycle 13 is going to hit on Dec. 21, or 23, or 24."

If past doomsday scares are any guide, it will take a while for the folks who were so worried about 12/21/12 to settle down. Some might claim that the date for the apocalypse was miscalculated, and will actually come at a later time. Others might say that the world-shifting change has actually begun, but the rest of us just can't sense it yet. Case studies abound, ranging from the Great Disappointment of 1844 to the Planet Clarion prophecy of 1954 to the Rapture of 2011.

The precise day or hour of the Maya calendar turnover doesn't matter all that much to Witschey.

"It's no big deal," he said. "Whatever day it is, I'm going to wake up the next day, going forward."

That sounds sensible to me. How's it sound to you? Even though it's no big deal, we'll be passing along updates during the Big Day and beyond. Just check in with http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/2012 for the latest.

Update for 9:15 p.m. ET: Although New Zealand hasn't had to contend with a Maya apocalypse, they might have to deal with the remnants of Cyclone Evan over the long weekend.

Update for 11:15 p.m. ET: NASA says it has been fielding hundreds of questions a day from people who are worried about 12/21/12. "We have done all we can to answer questions from the public," David Morrison, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, told NBC News in an email. "Unfortunately, many don't believe us, like several mothers who have written to me in the last few hours asking if they should keep their children at home today."

Morrison forwarded one email message (with the sender's name removed) that he said was typical. Here's what it said: "Just like to know how I can survive the end of the world? Two friends of mine committed suicide this week because of that dreaded day, date. I just want to try to survive, and please tell me what to do!?"

It's impossible to verify the substance of that particular email, but if the sentiment is "typical," I'm hoping such folks are getting the reassurance they need. DON'T PANIC!

Update for 9:20 a.m. ET Dec. 21: I've added a video from TODAY that sounds the all-clear in the apocalypse drill. 

More about 2012:

• Why NASA jumped the gun on doomsday
• Doomsday hot spots around the globe
• Video: 'We're very respectful of traditions'
• Five apocalyptic dooms and why they won't happen
• Apocalypse-shmockalypse: 6 genuine natural threats
• Cosmic Log archive on 2012 and doomsday fears

This report includes information from Reuters and The Associated Press. The issue of when the 13th baktun ends is addressed in depth in "Exploring the 584286 Correlation Between the Maya and European Calendars" by Simon Martin and Joel Skidmore, published in the Fall 2012 issue of The PARI Journal.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

El Peru-Waka Regional Archaeological Project

A carved alabaster jar found in the burial chamber of a high-ranking Maya woman led archaeologists to conclude the tomb was that of Lady K'abel, who was one of the great queens of the Classic Maya civilization. These pictures show the two sides of the jar. On the left, the head of a woman rises from the conch-shell carving. On the right, Maya glyphs identify the jar's owner.

Glyphs carved into a tiny alabaster jar have led archaeologists to conclude that the tomb in Guatemala where the jar was found belonged to one of the greatest queens of the Classic Maya civilization, known as Lady K'abel.

"She was not only a queen, but a supreme warlord, and that made her the most powerful person in the kingdom during her lifetime," David Freidel, an archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said in a report released today. That description would put Lady K'abel in the same class as other ruling women of the ancient world, ranging from the biblical Queen of Sheba to Egypt's Hatshepsut and Cleopatra.

Freidel is the co-director of an excavation at the royal Maya city of El Peru-Waka in Guatemala's northwestern Peten region, near the Mexican border. The tomb site has been under study for almost a decade. Freidel and his colleagues found artifacts suggesting that a high-ranking female personage had been buried there, and Lady K'abel was the No. 1 candidate. But it took the alabaster jar, small enough to fit in a queen's hand, to clinch the case.

The jar is carved to look like a conch shell, with the head and arm of an aged woman emerging from the opening. Four Maya hieroglyphs were carved into the back of the jar, including two titles referring to the owner: "Lady Waterlily-Hand" and "Lady Snake Lord." These names have long been associated with Lady K'abel.

Stanley Guenter

Four glyphs were found on the alabaster vessel: The first appears to read "the house of." The second is thought to refer to the contents of the vessel. The third can be translated as "Lady Waterlily-Hand." The fourth is "Lady Snake Lord," identifying the lady as a princess of Calakmul.

"It's as close to a smoking gun in archaeology as we can get," Freidel told me today. "Archaeology is a circumstantial science, but we're putting this forward as our working hypothesis."

Like Cleopatra, Lady K'abel held her own in the midst of powerful men — including her husband, K'inich Bahlam II, with whom she ruled the Wak kingdom for at least 20 years in the late 7th century (672 to 692). Because K'abel held the additional title of military governor, she was considered more powerful than the king. This wasn't strictly a love match: K'abel was a princess from the Kan dynasty, the imperial family who ruled from the great city of Calakmul. Her marriage was in line with a political alliance between the king in Waka and the emperor in Calakmul — against the region's other superpower, the city-state of Tikal.

The artifacts found in the tomb suggest that the person buried there was held in great reverence. For example, the alabaster jar contained red cinnabar pigment, which the Maya used in royal burial chambers. Freidel and his colleagues believe the jar served as a funerary "white soul flower cache vessel," which was thought to hold one of the several souls specified in Maya religious texts.

Another ritual item, a jade jewel representing the Maya maize god, was found on the body of the woman in the tomb. And a potbellied figurine was placed at the woman's groin. Freidel said this figurine appears to represent the Blue Moon Akan, a Maya death god that was the companion of kings. "That is remarkable," he said. "I see an image of the Akan, born mystically by the dead queen who was the warlord of her kingdom."

After Lady K'abel's reign, Tikal's rulers continued their war against Waka and Calakmul. By the middle of the eighth century, Tikal had the upper hand in the Maya superpower struggle. And by the middle of the ninth century, the Classic Maya civilization was well on its way to its mysterious collapse. But the lady's tomb remained, apparently serving as a monument to a take-charge woman warrior.

Does this close the case of the princess with the alabaster jar? Not yet. The word from Freidel is that there's much more to come. For example, there's still a chance that the jar was actually an heirloom item, passed down from Lady K'abel to another woman in the royal family who was buried in the tomb.

"A royal tomb of this kind is very complicated, forensically," he told me. "It will take years to publish this out, but that's normal for Maya archaeology."

More about the Maya:

• How the Maya lived
• Maya myth revealed
• Maya doom teaches climate lesson
• Maya workshop documents time beyond 2012
• 2012 and Maya prophecies: What were they thinking?

The El Peru-Waka excavation is co-directed by Juan Carlos Pérez, former vice minister of culture for cultural heritage of Guatemala. Olivia Navarro-Farr, assistant professor of anthropology at the College of Wooster in Ohio, directed the excavations with Griselda Pérez Robles, former director of prehistoric monuments in the National Institute of Anthropology and History, and archaeologist Damaris Menéndez.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

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.

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.

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.