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Around 700 AD, Tikal had the largest dam built by the ancient Maya of Central America, used sand filtration to cleanse water entering reservoirs, a "switching station" that accommodated seasonal filling and release of water, and the deepest, rock-cut canal segment in the Maya lowlands. All this to support a population at Tikal of perhaps 60,000 to 80,000 inhabitants and an estimated population of five million in the overall Maya lowlands.

One of the greatest archaeological riddles—and one of the grossest academic omissions—of our time is the untold story of the parallel ruins left by two seemingly unrelated ancient civilizations: the ancient Mayans on one side of the Pacific Ocean and the ancient Balinese on the other. The mysterious and unexplained similarities in their architecture, iconography, and religion are so striking and profound that the Mayans and Balinese seem to have been twin civilizations—as if children of the same parent. Yet, incredibly, this mystery is not only being ignored by American scholars, it’s being suppressed. What does archaeology have to do...

The oldest-known version of the ancient Maya calendar has been discovered adorning a lavishly painted wall in the ruins of a city deep in the Guatemalan rainforest. The hieroglyphs, painted in black and red, along with a colorful mural of a king and his mysterious attendants, seem to have been a sort of handy reference chart for court scribes in A.D. 800 — the astronomers and mathematicians of their day. Contrary to popular myth, this calendar isn't a countdown to the end of the world in December 2012, the study researchers said.

An ancient Mayan skull stolen from Tibet by Nazis - said to have magical powers to enable humanity to survive the December 2012 apocalypse - has been dropped by a lab assistant in eastern Germany, chipping its chin. The volcanic rock skull, named Quauthemoc, was dropped - or, more eerily, may have fallen of its own accord - during a photo-shoot at a laboratory in the small town of Glauchau, Saxony. "It was probably put down somewhere a bit wobbly," an eye-witness told Bild newspaper. "Suddenly it crashed to the floor. A big piece broke off the chin. It's really...

The countdown to the apocalypse is on. We're one year away from Dec. 21, 2012, the date that the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar allegedly marked as the end of an era that would reset the date to zero and signal the end of humanity. But will it? There have been many end of times predictions over the years. Christian radio host Harold Camping faced widespread ridicule when his predictions that the world would end twice this year - on May 21, and then on Oct. 21 - failed to materialize. But in the flurry of doomsday predictions - there...

A year from today the world will come to an end, according to some who cite the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar as evidence of a Dec. 21, 2012, apocalypse. But both astronomers and experts on Mesoamerican history say the Mayan apocalypse is likely to be another in a long line of failed doomsdaysAccording to the Maya Long Count calendar, the winter solstice of 2012 — Dec. 21, 2012 —is the end of a b'ak'tun, a 144,000-day cycle that has repeated 12 times since the mythical Maya creation date. The b'ak'tun that will end in 2012 is the...

Recently news has surfaced that claims there was a huge miscalculation in transferring the Mayan long count calendar over to our Gregorian calendar, with out boring you to death, it apears to have something to do with the movements of venus, it all sounds nice till they get to the bottom line. No one knows what the date would be or if it has already come and gone, so if this is to be believed it literally means that the alignment has already taken place or may at anytime going forward, they claim the date of December 21 2012 is...

Balloon Boy's Father 'Wanted TV fame Before World Ends In 2012' Richard Heene, the man suspected of the alleged "balloon boy" hoax, was driven by a conviction that the world will come to a cataclysmic end in 2012, according to a friend. Nick Allen in Los Angeles 20 Oct 2009 Robert Thomas, who claims to have been a confidante and researcher for Mr Heene, has been interviewed by police. Mr Thomas's lawyer, Linda Lee, claimed: "Heene believes the world is going to end in 2012. Because of that he wanted to make money quickly, become rich enough to build a...

Signs are evident we are living in a spiritually prophetic age. Many have deep seated questions about our times and are frantically searching for answers wherever they can to find them. Intellectuals are turning to lost civilizations like the Mayans and the ambiguous predictions of Nostradamus to satisfy a need for truth. They’ve even dug up some of old Merlin’s psychic prophesies to learn what he said about the end of the world — we won’t repeat them here. Their conclusion after gathering all the prophetic material: All sources agree, the world will end in 2012. It can’t be a...

It seems like everyone has their own vision of the Apocalypse. For Christians, The End is synonymous with the Four Horsemen, the Rapture and the Anti-Christ. Environmentalists, meanwhile, fear climate change, melting polar ice caps and turbulent weather. For paranoid newshounds, if rogue states like Iran or North Korea don't trigger a nuclear war, then debt-wracked banks will soon lead to total societal collapse. Then there's Hollywood: aliens, meteors, earthquakes, malfunctioning uteri and Hitchcock's angry birds. While the Apocalypse-theme has essentially become a pop culture cliché, it remains endlessly fascinating. Case in point: the Christian-focused "Left Behind" books, which have...

Mayans couldn't even see their own End of Days MY prediction for the year 2012, which I am told begins tomorrow, is that the world will not end. This is despite the belief that the Mayan calendar says that it will. The calendar was devised 5,125 years ago by the Mayans of Central America, a people who never had the wit to invent the wheel, but it runs out on Dec. 21, 2012. The End of Days, so to speak. If, as some seers suggest, thats an accurate prediction, you have less than a year to get your affairs in...

Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap, near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside. Visible are at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures. Much more may be hidden underground. It is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.

Mexico - The Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History have admitted that they have a second reference to the date 2012 as "end of the world" on a carved fragment found at an archaeological site in southern Mexico. Salt Lake Tribune reports that archaeologists have long acknowledged that reference to date 2012 as "end of the world" is found on a stone tablet from the Tortuguero site in the Gulf coast state of Tabasco. But on Thursday, the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History announced that there is what appears another reference to the same date in an...

Various Mayan scholars have attempted to debunk this reading, including Sven Gronemeyer of Australia’s La Trobe University, who has studied the Tortugero tablet in great detail. On Wednesday he presented his decoding of the inscription, suggesting that Bolon Yokte’s prophesied appearance on December 21, 2012, represents the start of a new era and not the end of days. Proponents of the apocalyptic interpretation have misunderstood the poorly preserved hieroglyphs, he said.

I have come across a piece which looks like a Mayan death mask, anyone know much about this type of possible artifact?

A University of Colorado Boulder-led team excavating a Maya village in El Salvador buried by a volcanic eruption 1,400 years ago has unexpectedly hit an ancient white road that appears to lead to and from the town, which was frozen in time by a blanket of ash. The road, known as a "sacbe," is roughly 6 feet across and is made from white volcanic ash from a previous eruption that was packed down and shored up along its edges by residents living there in roughly A.D. 600, said CU-Boulder Professor Payson Sheets, who discovered the buried village known as Ceren...

The skeleton of a Maya Queen - with her head mysteriously placed between two bowls - is just one of the treasures found in a 2,000-year-old rodent-infested tomb. Priceless jade gorgets, beads, and ceremonial knives were also discovered in the cavern - which was found underneath a younger 1,300-year-old tomb which also contained a body - in the Guatemalan ruins of Nakum. The two royal burials are the first to be discovered at the site, which was once a densely packed Maya centre.

Reeking of decay and packed with bowls of human fingers, a partly burned baby, and gem-studded teeth—among other artifacts—a newfound Maya king's tomb sounds like an overripe episode of Tales From the Crypt. But the tightly sealed, 1,600-year-old burial chamber, found under a jungle-covered Guatemalan pyramid, is as rich with archaeological gold as it is with oddities, say researchers who announced the discovery Friday. "This thing was like Fort Knox," said Brown University archaeologist Stephen Houston, who led the excavation in the ancient, overgrown Maya town of El Zotz. Alternating layers of flat stones and mud preserved human bones, wood...

A team of Mexican specialists discovered remnants of a 2,000-year-old Mayan palace at an archaeological site in the southeastern state of Chiapas. "The discovery constitutes the first architectural evidence of such an early occupation of the ancient Mayan cities of the Upper Usumacinta basin" in the Lacandona Jungle, the National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement Wednesday. The project's director, Luis Alberto Martos, said this new discovery was made in a sunken courtyard located in the northern part of the the Plan de Ayutla archaeological site and represents the first evidence of occupation of that area between...

For Palenque inhabitants, marine fossils were the convincing proof of the land being covered by the sea long time ago, and parting from this fact they created their idea of the origin of the world, declared archaeologist Martha Cuevas, responsible, with geologist Jesus Alvarado, of research conducted by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Ongoing for 3 years, the investigation is oriented to understand symbolism given by ancient Mayas to Prehistoric vestiges, specifically the 31 specimens found at the archaeological site. The INAH researcher mentioned that petrified rests have been...