At the Guatemalan site (click here) in 2010 the Boston University archaeologist and Ph.D. student Franco Rossi were inspecting a looters' tunnel, where an undergraduate student had noticed the faintest traces of paint on a thin stucco wall.
The pair began cleaning off 1,200-year-old mud and suddenly a little more red paint appeared.
"Suddenly Bill was like, 'Oh my God, we have a glyph!'" Rossi said.
What the team found, after a full excavation in 2011, is likely the ancient workroom of a Maya scribe, a record-keeper of Xultún.
"The reason this room's so interesting," said Rossi, as he crouched in the chamber late last year, "is that ... this was a workspace. People were seated on this bench" painting books that have long since disintegrated.
The books would have been filled with elaborate calculations intended to predict the city's fortunes. The numbers on the wall were "fixed tabulations that they can then refer to—tables more or less like those in the back of your chemistry book," he added.
"Undoubtedly this type of room exists at every Maya site in the Late Classic [period] and probably earlier, but it's our only example thus far."...
