A painted chamber in the Maya site of Xultun has given archaeologists something they had not seen before, a named scientist.
In a paper published today in Antiquity, archaeologist David Stuart and colleagues report what they say is the first-ever known Maya mathematician-astronomer, Saktahnwaax, or “White-Chested Fox,” who likely lived around 800 CE.
According to the paper, an inscription on the chamber wall read “so says Saktahnwaax,” suggesting that either the person themselves or someone else “signed” the work and attributed the formulas to Saktahnwaax.
The chamber is at Xultun, a Maya relic in modern-day Guatemala. Stuart and his colleagues first entered it in 2010 and found many mathematical and astronomical formulas painted on its walls.
In addition to the name, the team reported a previously unseen formula that Stuart, of the University of Texas in Austin, told Gizmodo showed the Maya’s “unique and elegant” understanding of time and astronomy.
“The Maya were very keen observers of nature, and they were always looking at patterns and connections (like any scientist),” said Stuart, the paper’s first author. “This is the first named scientist from the pre-Columbian Americas. I think it’s incredibly important that the Maya be seen as a culture that was immersed in scientific inquiry and in a sophisticated way.”
Stuart said Maya scientific traditions developed independently from those of the “Old World.” He said the Maya were closely watching the same celestial phenomena as others and meticulously “integrating their cycles into some unified vision of time.”
He also said archaeologists had previously identified only the names of Maya kings, queens or other political figures. The new finding, he said, finally puts a name to a Maya mathematician or astronomer, probably the same role in Maya society.
Stuart said the discovery came as a surprise and the team did not begin with a fixed research question. He said previous looting had exposed part of the painted wall, and the team began excavating there.
That work revealed about 50 paintings and written texts, most tied to astronomical and mathematical observations. The researchers then made scale drawings and digitally enhanced photographs to decipher the texts.
When they first examined Saktahnwaax’s “signature,” Stuart said they were careful not to rush their interpretation. Before anything else, he said, the team wanted to rule out “all other possibilities.”
The formula likely attributed to Saktahnwaax is a “sequence of glyphs that represent a sequence of dates covering a span of 2,920 days,” Stuart said.
“We knew this was an important number, because it is the convergence of 8 solar years (365 days) and 5 Venus years. This formula also includes other cycles in a unique way, showing that the span also consists of other subdivisions of time that the Maya were tracking.”
“It’s similar to finding the whiteboard of an ancient scientist’s office and examining every scribble and note and formula on it,” Stuart concluded. “Some are still obscure, and there are a few we still need to study.”
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