Science and the Human Sciences: Prehispanic Maya Settlement and History

(This is a guest post by Gary Feinman)

Published in the journal Science, Medina-Elizalde and Rohling’s (2012) quantitative analysis of Terminal Classic period Maya (AD 800-1000) climatic shifts is a welcome refinement of the extent of a late 1^st millennium episode of climatic change. Yet the authors' speculations regarding the fall of inland Maya settlements (the so-called Maya Collapse) is fraught with failures in logic and limitations in hypothesis evaluation that too often are characteristic of natural scientists delving naively into the causes and complexities of societal change. Even more problematic is the repeated license given by one of the world’s premier science journals to this kind of disciplinary overreach at a time when extremely few articles by archaeologists are offered this broadly visible platform. 

Medina-Elizalde and Rohling begin with the premise that drought precipitated the collapse of these inland centers. But, when finding precipitation declines of only 40%, they do not reconsider their presumed causality, instead inferring that the Maya polities were so fragile that even the estimated rainfall declines were enough to generate collapse. These findings then underpin their policy warning that even minor climatic shifts may fatally endanger contemporary states facing present climatic shifts.

Left entirely unconsidered in their historical reconstructions of causality are the numerous other factors, from warfare to shifts in pan-Mesoamerican exchange patterns, that have been advanced as keys to the fall of the Classic Maya states. The consideration, evaluation, and elimination of alternative hypotheses are central to truly scientific inquiry, and their absence from this work only reinforces the preconceived bias that the prehispanic Maya were not sufficiently ingenious to respond to natural environmental fluctuations. It is crucial to recognize that Maya polities in northern Yucatán and coastal Belize, some of the driest parts of the Maya domain, thrived during and after the decline of inland settlements and populations.

Also problematic are the advanced policy implications. While I share concerns about anthropogenic environmental and climatic changes that hazard the modern world, the authors’ perspectives view humans as incapable of forging effective responses to external perturbations. And yet, those of us dedicated to understanding our species’ history recognize that we have repeatedly established cooperative networks at various scales to address and forestall similar challenges. If modern societies fail and fall, the responsibilities will be borne in part by our cooperative, competitive, and leadership networks and arrangements rather than merely the consequence of declines in rainfall.

At its current best, contemporary archaeological practice strives for serious evaluations of the causes and consequences of social actions and change. Repeatedly we have seen that through history rarely have climatic perturbations alone been both the proximate and ultimate causes of significant shifts in human settlement and catastrophic upheavals in political organization (e.g., Middleton 2012). Given the problems faced by our species today, the publishers of Science ought to lend their weighty profile and give greater voice to those of us endeavoring to understand the repertoire of behaviors that humans and their social groupings have derived and innovated to address the suite of challenges that they have faced. Many of those historical episodes may bear key insights for addressing the hazards and challenges that we as a species and a society face today.

References Cited

Medina-Elizalde, Martín, and Eelco J. Rohling

2012 Collapse of Classic Maya Civilization related to modest reduction in precipitation. Science 335:956-959.

Middleton, Guy D.

2012 Nothing lasts forever: environmental discourses on the collapse of past societies. Journal of Archaeological Research 20. In press (available online).

Gary M. Feinman

The Field Museum

Softcore Solipsism

 “Softcore solipsism” is the name given by Charles Tilly to the work of social historians who take a low-intensity postmodernist approach to theory and research, a kind of “postmodern light.” Although Tilly criticizes this approach in various works, the most explicit is in a book review essay titled “softcore solipsism” (Tilly 1994); see also Tilly (1998, 2008, 2010). I think this phrase is an apt description of much recent archaeological theory.

Solipsism is the philosophical doctrine that the only thing one can be sure exists is one’s own mind. The external world does not exist, or we cannot know that it exists, so only a person’s mind is important. The softcore version admits that the real world exists, but casts doubt on the notion that scholars can generate objective knowledge about that reality (particularly in the past). Everyone has their own views of the ancient past, and who is to decide that one view is better than another? Specifically, the foci of analysis are ideas and mental states. These are what matter in the study of the past.

Tilly’s discussion of softcore solipsism in social history includes these features (Tilly 1994):

• Only mental states are important.
• Avoidance of causality in general, and explicit denial and denigration of the notion that economic phenomena have a causative effect on society and social patterns.
• A linguistic or textual analogy for human experience.
• Statements about past human society are seen as not intersubjectively verifiable.
• Heavy usage of weak verbs and passive voice in writing.

Does this sound familiar? Check out recent archaeological writing on the following topics:

• Identity or identities
• The meaning of material culture
• Agency and practice theory
• Social construction
• Material culture as a text
• Postcolonial and poststructural perspectives

 I am not saying that every archaeological work that deals with one or more of these themes can be categorized as softcore solipsism. But if the shoe fits….

Sometimes I take a relativist perspective on things like archaeological softcore solipsism. If people want to talk about this stuff, that’s fine; it doesn’t prevent more materialist and empirically-minded archaeologists from doing our work. This is the way I phrase my distaste for high-level social theory in my urban theory paper (Smith 2011). If archaeologists want to run around quoting Giddens and Bourdieu in every other sentence, that is fine, but this kind of theory is not at all necessary for doing explanatory analyses of past societies. It may make people feel good, but it will not move research forward.

At other times I get more alarmed by softcore solipsism. It seems to have hijacked a whole generation of archaeologists, who have been diverted from the hard work of empirical documentation and causal explanation of past societies and their changes. Too many smart archaeologists spend their time trying to figure out clever new ways to guess at past mental states, instead of devising new methodological and epistemological approaches to generate reliable empirical knowledge about the past. Too many archaeologists want to deconstruct or "problmatize" knowledge of the past, rather than building and accumulating knowledge. When postmodernism hit the academy many disciplines dealt with it and moved on, whereas anthropology and archaeology got stuck in the mud, and are still struggling to get out. I think this has seriously harmed the discipline of archaeology. I have found in Charles Tilly's work a strong direction forward for archaeology as a comparative, historical, and materialist social science. Check out his work.

Smith, Michael E.

2011    Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18:167-192.

Tilly, Charles

1994    Softcore Solipsism. Labour / Le Travail 34:259-268.

1998    Durable Inequality. University of California Press, Berkeley.

2008    Explaining Social Processes. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO.

2010    Mechanisms of the Middle Range. In Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociological Explanation, edited by Craig Calhoun, pp. 54-62. Columbia University Press, New York.

Television shows celebrate looting

This is an excerpt from an email sent to SAA members by President Fred Limp:


"Late last week the SAA Board was informed that there are two TV series planned that promote and glorify the looting and destruction of archaeological sites. They are American Diggers and Diggers. The first is scheduled for Spike TV and the other for National Geographic TV. As past SAA President Bob Kelly wrote in a recent e-mail in response to American Diggers, "This shameless and shameful program will glorify and promote the mindless destruction of archaeological sites in the U.S." 

SAA and other groups, such as SHA, have already prepared and sent strong letters condemning both of these programs to the production companies, networks, and others. Copies of the SAA letters can be found on the SAA website (http://bit.ly/w2MHJM, and http://bit.ly/wzT7IA). The letters provide details on why we are so concerned. Up to this point Spike TV has not responded to the public outcry. Leadership of National Geographic, however, has indicated that, while they are unable to stop the showing tomorrow on such short notice, they will place a disclaimer into the show that speaks to laws protecting archaeological and historic sites. They are also willing to enter into discussions with the archaeological community to determine how to raise awareness of the impacts of the use of metal detectors for treasure hunting. We will advise you of developments in this area."


Earlier today, Peter Peregrine (President, Society for Anthropological Sciences) sent around the following update:

"It appears that National Geographic Channel has pulled their show—at least it no longer shows up on its website (though repeats of the episodes aired yesterday are still scheduled for Friday).  I heard through the grapevine that legal action might be initiated in the case of the artifact collecting done at the Old Montana State Prison (state owned and a National Register property) during the first episode that aired, as it seems the SHPO was not informed of that work and no permit was issued."

Does anyone recall what happened with the SAA and eBay several years ago? eBay was (and is) selling antiquities, and many archaeologists were boycotting the service (I still am). I don't remember what official actions, if any, were taken by the SAA, AIA, etc.

Jonathan Marks tells archaeologists to "put down those beers"

Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks writes some of the more insightful and entertaining works in anthropology today. Check out his website for his publications. (By the way, are YOUR publications posted online???).  I particularly like his book reviews; they are concise and pithy, often containing some real zingers that put people and ideas in their place.

I just read his outstanding book review essay on seven books on cultural evolution by evolutionary psychologists and others:

Marks, Jonathan
    2012    Recent Advances in Culturomics. Evolutionary Anthropology 21:38-42.

If you have read some of these works applying biological models to cultural evolution, you will recognize the aptness of Marks' comments (such as the fact that decades ago anthropology solved many of the supposed problems they bring up).

Anyway, to the remarks on archaeologists and beers. Marks ends his essay arguing for the importance of distinguishing good science from bad science (a major theme in his publications), and the need to link anthropology to broader intellectual currents. Such linkages:

"will probably also require some archaeologists to put down those beers and get involved in building the intellectual bridges that will link the natural and social studies of human evolution." (Marks 2012:42).

I am all in favor of building these bridges (check out my past posts indexed with "Archaeology and other disciplines"), but do we really have to "put down those beers"  do do this? I write this from the Texas hill country, where I have very much enjoyed the ales from the "Real Ale" brewery in Blanco, TX.

Coercive citations

Suppose you had submitted a paper to a journal ("Journal-X") and you got this message from the editor: "You only cite Journal-X once. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Journal-X to your present article." Would you comply? This is known as "coercive citation," something I had never heard of until I read the latest issue of Science:

Wilhite, Allen W. and Eric A. Fong  (2012)  Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing. Science 335:542-543.

It seems that this practice is rampant in the fields of business research. These authors did a thorough study with lots of interviews with authors and studies of journals in several fields. At least some authors in every field considered (social sciences and business) reported attempts a coercive citation, but there was considerable variation. They took economics journals as the standard for regression analysis, and found that contributors to journals in marketing, management, finance, and information systems were 15 to 20% more likely to have been coerced like this. Contributors to journals in sociology and psychology were 5 to 10% LESS likely to have been coerced.

Why does this happen? So that journals can increase their impact factor. One interesting finding: authors in the business fields don't generally think this is quite such a bad practice, whereas authors in psychology and sociology were really outraged about this. I'm sure archaeologists would also be outraged. We can whine and complain about archaeology journals, but at least they aren't engaging in coercive citations (at least I have never encountered any evidence of this).

A parable about open access to scholarly publications

Check out the nice piece in The Guardian today,
"The parable of the farmers and the teleporting duplicator" by Mike Taylor in The Guardian, Feb 10, 2012.

American Anthropological Association joins the dark side of the force

Check out Daniel Lende's post on Neuroanthopology, "American Anthropological Association takes public stand against open access." This concerns an open letter submitted by AAA Executive Director William Davis to the White House call for public comment on public access to scholarly publications. Wow, it looks like the AAA has lined up with the commercial publishers, not with scholars and researchers.

Do you recall the cartoon I published on open access a few weeks ago? Well, the AAA has now joined with commercial publishers as the tail wagging the research dog.

This development makes me glad that I resigned from the American Anthropological Association last year. It is one thing to complain about a professional association that is inefficient or clueless or off-base about some things. But the situation is really bad when the leadership goes over to the dark side of the force, making scholars ashamed of being anthropologists.

Rejected by Science !!

I just got a rejection for a manuscript sent to the journal Science. That's strike two for me with Science (I sent them my paper on agricultural terraces, back in the early 1990s; it ended up in JFA). I have something else up my sleeve for Science; maybe the third time will work. Because so many papers are submitted to Science, they have a bulk system for evaluating them. Each manuscript gets a quick once-over by one of a small number of editors, who say "no" to most papers. If they say "yes," then the paper gets sent out for peer review. This means that rejections come fast - it took them just a few days to reject my paper. I have to admire that efficiency.

This experience got me thinking about how the Science review process affects the kinds of archaeology papers published in the journal. If you pay attention to the journal, you will know that they tend to favor high-tech methods, archaeometry, fancy quantitative methods, and reports about "the earliest" this or that. While I can only recall one or two papers in Science that I thought were incompetent (a much better record than most archaeology journals, some of which are full of incompetent articles), their selection of archaeology papers is definitely biased in a certain direction. I think one way of expressing this might be that Science publishes archaeology articles that will appeal on methodological grounds to non-archaeological scientists. My guess is that papers that are more synthetic or less methods-heavy don't make it through the initial review (which is done by non-archaeological scientists).

This suggestion links up with the issue of what does "science" mean in archaeology. Not in some big ontological sense, but in practical terms. What kinds of archaeology can be called scientific, and what kinds of archaeology are recognized by other scientists (such as editors at the journal Science) as being scientific in nature? "Scientific method" in archaeology has two meanings. (1) On the one hand science means research done following a scientific epistemology (empirically testable, logically coherent, done with a critical spirit, etc.), whether it employs high-tech methods or not. (2) Scientific methods in archaeology also means the use of non-archaeological scientific techniques: archaeometry and the like. Now ideally, these two meanings of "science" go together, but often they do not. Much research that is epistemologically scientific does not use jazzy methods (as in the paper that was recently rejected by Science). And scientific methods (sense #2) are often used in non-scientific research (sense #1).

What do I mean by that last observation? Consider two examples. First, there are post-processual archaeologists who explicitly reject a scientific epistemology for archaeology, yet they embrace archaeometric methods. This is science of definition #2, done in opposition to science of definition #1. Would this kind of research get by the editors of the journal Science? Good question. Second, there is research that would claim to follow a scientific epistemology, but is too sloppy to be considered good science. Many archaeometric sourcing studies fit here. The archaeologists picks a bunch of artifacts of type X, and subjects them to technical provenience analyses. But if those artifacts were not selected with a rigorous sampling scheme, then this is simply not a good scientific research design. The results cannot be generalized beyond the sample that was analyzed (although archaeologists who are sloppy in picking their samples tend to also be sloppy in overgeneralizing their results). Now this kind of work can easily get past the editors and reviewers of journals, which always puzzles me and bugs the heck out of me. I have pissed off a number of authors and editors over the years with my complaints about the publication of such papers.

So, what's a scientific archaeologist (definition #1, whether or not using methods from definition #2) to do? I guess try another journal. For the sake of the discipline, one can only hope that these powerful editors at Science are not too often fooled by science #2 that does not conform to science #1.

Has Latin American Antiquity abandoned book reviews?

Just got the Dec 2011 issue of Latin American Antiquity. This allowed me to complete the book review graph through 2011. This graph shows the number of book reviews published per year in the journal:


This really steams me up, and I've complained about it before; see some of the posts listed under "book reviews" in the list of terms on the right side of the blog (scroll down).

We can't trust publishers, even academic presses, to not publish bad books. Yes, most book manuscripts are reviewed by outside reviewers, but a good number of real stinkers (and lots of pedestrian yawners) get through that process and are published each year. So how does the discipline exercise quality control with respect to books? This is a prime role for book reviews in peer reviewed journals.  But if the major journals refuse to publish book reviews, the discipline suffers. My field, Mesoamerican archaeology, is particularly badly served by its major journals. Ancient Mesoamerica refuses to publish any book reviews at all. And Latin American Antiquity does allow book reviews, but now they only publish a few reviews each year (see graph).

If you want to see a really bad book criticized in a zinger of a review, check out Richard Blanton's review of a new book by Charles Maisels in the online journal, Cliodynamics.

Internet on strike against censorship

Wednesday, Jan 18, much of the Internet will be on strike to protest the censorship legislation now before Congress. The bill, known as "Stop Online Piracy Act," will have a chilling effect on the use of the internet in the U.S. and around the world. Scholarship and free expression will be reduced, while large media corporations will increase their profits. Lots of basic scholarly practice will become criminalized.

For information see the SOPA STRIKE site (including ways to write your congressman, code to temporarily black out your site for the day (as Wikipedia will do), and other materials.

Wikipedia has a very nice article, with pro and con views, supporters and detractors, technical details, and such.

Swords, chainsaws, and edited volumes

I'm not the only one with a dim view of the value of edited volumes. As I've expressed previously ("Why are so many edited volumes worthless?") most edited volumes in archaeology are insufficiently integrated, have too many poor quality essays, and do a poor job of advancing research. I was thus not surprised to find the following comments in a recent book review published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. This was a review of "Comparing Cities: the Middle East and South Asia" (ed. by Ali and Rieker, Oxford Univ press, 2010. Review 2011, JRAI 17:671-672); review by Hayder Al-Mohammad:

"one is left to wonder what this edited volume is hoping to respond to or push in terms of new resesarch, ideas, and methods." (p.671)

"Comparing Cities should be a warning to future editors of volumes that readers require more than just a number of articles thrown together in one book to make it a worthy and coherent read." (p.672)

Well, I an dubious about whether the poor quality of any single edited volume will serve as a warning for future volume editors. If so, the genre of poor edited volume would not still be flourishing. 
 

 Unfortunately the kind of quality control shown in the cartoon above is typically absent from the evaluation of edited volumes by publishers. Maybe if we had more tough-looking reviewers armed with swords and chainsaws, and fewer pussycats armed with badminton rackets, the quality of archaeological edited volumes might improve.

Here are my older posts on edited volumes:

• Why are so many edited volumes worthless?
• Buried in an edited volume.
• Sloppy editing of edited volumes.

How can we explain social change in the past?

Philosophers of science and social scientists have identified a variety of perspectives on the meaning of explanation and the ways scholars go about explaining social phenomena in the present and the past. I would guess that I am like many archaeologists in generally avoiding this literature because much of the work and writing is difficult to follow and difficult to relate to archaeology. But over the past couple of years I have become convinced that we need to pay attention to this material so that we can do a better job of explaining the past. I've talked about this issue previously, here, and here. Today I will point to two authors who do discuss issues of explanation, causality, and epistemology in a particularly clear fashion, and in ways that relate to archaeology: Daniel Little and Charles Tilly.  

(1) Daniel Little is a philosopher of science who specializes in social science. He has an impressive record of publications (see below), and he writes with great clarity. I especially want to recommend his blog, Understanding Society. He has recently written a number of posts on explanation, and these are well worth reading by archaeologists:

• Recent thinking about scientific explanation (Jan 9, 2012)
• Emergence (Jan 6, 2012)
• Supervenience and social entities (Dec. 30, 2011)
• Do organizations have causal powers? (Sep. 1, 2011)
• Relative explanatory autonomy (Aug 7, 2011)

A few publications by Daniel Little:

1988    Collective Action and the Traditional Village. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 1(1):41-58.
1998    Microfoundations, Method, and Causation: On the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Transaction, New Brunswick.
2007    Levels of the Social. In Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, edited by Stephen P. Turner and Mark W. Risjord, pp. 343-371. Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Elsevier, New York.
2010    New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Springer, New York.
2011    Causal Mechanisms in the Social Realm. In Causality in the Sciences, edited by Phyllis McKay Illari, Federica Russo, and Jon Williamson, pp. 273-295. Oxford University Press, New York.


(2) Charles Tilly was one of the leading social scientists of the late 20th-early 21st century. His field was historical social science, applying political and sociological models to historical data. He was a highly original thinker, and published numerous books and articles (see below for a few). The following scheme outlines five ways that social scientists and social historians have approached the topic of explanation. It is a synthesis and paraphrase of three sources: Tilly (2001, 2008), and Tilly and Gooden (2006).

1.      Skepticism. The world is too complex to explain. Sounds like post-processual archaeology (oops, I think I mean social archaeology).

2.      Law-seeking accounts. Social life is said to exhibit empirical regularities that at their highest level take the form of laws; explanation then consists of subsuming particular cases under broadly validated empirical generalizations or even universal laws. This approach, associated with Carl Hempel, was considered outdated and inappropriate for social science even BEFORE Binford and the New Archaeologists adopted it as the standard for archaeological explanation (leading to Flannery's observation that this approach could only produce "Mickey Mouse Laws").

3.      Propensity accounts. Social units are seen as self-directing, whether driven by emotions, motives, interests, rational choices, genes, or something else. Explanation then consists of reconstructing the state of the social unit—for example, an individual’s beliefs at a given point in time and space—and plausibly relating its actions to that state. Even if this were considered a valid social science approach (see Tilly for critiques), it pretty clearly would not work for archaeology.

4.      Systemic explanations. Particular features of social life are explained by specifying their connections with putative larger entities: societies, cultures, mentalities, capitalist systems, world systems, and the like. Explanation then consists of locating elements within systems. Functional explanation is a subcategory of systemic explanations. This approach is valuable for explaining some aspects of some past phenomena, but inadequate or incomplete as a general approach to explanation.

5.      Mechanism-based accounts. This approach claims that explanation consists of identifying in particular social phenomena reliable causal mechanisms and processes of general scope. Causal mechanisms are events that alter relations among some set of elements. Processes are frequent (but not universal) combinations and sequences of causal mechanisms.

Not surprisingly, the causal mechanism approach is the one favored by Tilly, Little, and many social scientists today. Whereas law-seeking accounts explain events and processes by showing that they fit under a general law, mechanism-based accounts explain events by identifying the causes that brought them about. Thus law-seeking accounts require a general law explaining, for example, the rise of the state in all cases, and a universal trajectory followed by all cases. Mechanisms-based accounts, on the other hand, identify a small number of causal mechanisms (population growth, intensification, etc.) that operate in distinct combinations in diverse settings to bring about parallel (but not identical) processes of social change.

A few works by Charles Tilly:

Tilly, Charles
1984    Big Structures, Large Processes, and Huge Comparisons. Russell Sage Foundation, New York.

1990    Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990. Blackwell, Oxford.

1999    Durable Inequality. University of California Press, Berkeley.

2001    Relational Origins of Inequality. Anthropological Theory 1(3):355-372.

2008    Explaining Social Processes. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO.

2010    Mechanisms of the Middle Range. In Robert K. Merton: Sociology of Science and Sociological Explanation, edited by Craig Calhoun, pp. 54-62. Columbia University Press, New York.

Tilly, Charles and Robert E. Goodin
2006    It Depends. In Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly, pp. 3-32. Oxford University Press, New York.

Bill in US Congress to limit Open Access

The Research Works Act, H.R. 3699, is a bill that would make it illegal for researchers to post their own publications on the internet for public access. Guess who is behind this bill? Elsevier and the commercial publishing lobby (the Association of American Publishers).

Steven Harnad's post: The Private Publishing Tail Trying To Wag The Public Research Dog, Yet Again contains the most detailed and useful discussion of the issue that I've seen.

Michelle Clement's blog at Scientific American, Reseaerch Works Act would deny taxpayers access to federally funded research., starts out, "Carolyn Maloney, a congresswoman funded by Elsevier, which is a major for-profit publishing company, is trying to pass the Research Works Act, which would deny Americans free access to research funded by taxpayer money."

For more information about the bill and about WHAT U.S. CITIZENS CAN DO about this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.

Free labor by academics so that commercial publishers can make a profit

This allegory is from "Time for academics to withdraw free labor", on Dorothy Bishop's BishopBlog:

Jack is a sheep farmer. He gets some government subsidies, and also works long hours to keep his sheep happy and healthy. When his beasts are ready for slaughter, he offers them to an abattoir. The abattoir is very choosy and may reject Jack’s sheep, which is a disaster for him, as there is no other route to the market. If he is lucky the abattoir will accept the animals, slaughter them and sell them, at a large profit, to the supermarket. Jack does not see any of this money. The populace struggle to afford the price of meat, but the government has no control over this. When Jack feels like a nice piece of lamb, he buys it from the supermarket. Meanwhile, Jack provides his services for free as an inspector of other farmers’ animals.

 

Crazy story, right? But that’s the model that academic publishing follows..........

See BishopBlog for more. Dorothy Bishop wants authors and reviewers to boycott Elsevier journals.


Her blog has a number of fascinating and humorous posts, including:

How to become a celebrity science expert (sarcastic)

Science Journal Editors: A Taxonomy

Did the Maya predict the end of the world in 2012 ?

The whole craze over the supposed Maya prophecy of the end of the world in 2012 is based on bogus, commercialized, fake claims. The D-day ("destruction day) is one year off: December 21, 2012. This will not be the end of the world, nor will it mark a new era of enlightenment. The ancient Maya had numerous very accurate calendars. All of them were cyclical in that they came to an end and started over at zero. December 21, 2012 is merely the re-start date of the "Long count calendar," a count of days that started back in 3114 BC (well, at some point in the first millennium AD, the Maya extrapolated the Long count back to a zero date thousands of years earlier).

The Maya Long count calendar is just like the odometer on a car. There are five digits, and it ticks one digit for every day. Here are some dates:

8.12.14.8.15  ----  July 2, 292 (a date from the Maya city of Tikal)
12.19.18.17.15 ---- December 21, 2011 (today)
12.19.17.19.19  ----  December 20, 2012
0. 0. 0. 0. 0   ----   December 21, 2012

The 2012 text from Tortuguero

(This is a base-20 numbering system, with the middle digit only going up to 18 before repeating).

So, what did the Maya predict would happen on the zero date? There is exactly one (count 'em, one) ancient Maya hieroglpyhic text that talks about this, monument 6 at the site of Tortuguero (see photo at right). Apart from the fact that key parts of the monument are broken, the text is a bit enigmatic. One recent translation (from Gronemeyer & MacLeod 2010) reads:

• It will be completed the thirteenth Baktun [i.e., the end of the cycle]
• It is 4 Ajaw 3 Kankin [the day and month designations]
• And it will happen a "seeing"
• It is the display of [the god] Bolon-Yokte
• In a great "investiture."

- Gronemeyer, Sven and Barbara MacLeod  (2010)  What Could Happen in 2012: A Re-Analysis of the 13-Bak'tun Prophecy on Tortuguero Monument 6. Wayeb Notes vol. 34. Wayeb: European Association of Mayanists.


Hmmmmm, this is not about the end of the world, or a new beginning. It is an enigmatic statement that some god (whom we know next to nothing about) will show up on that date.

So why does everyone go around talking about the end of the world? Try typing "2012 Maya prophecy" into the search window in Amazon.com. There are more than 100 books about this topic. People are making money by inventing bogus claims about the 2012 Maya Long count event. It is a commercial feeding frenzy, involving wildly inaccurate and made-up claims by fake scholars. Read my lips:

THE MAYA DID NOT PREDICT THE END OF THE WORLD IN 2012.

The Maya were accomplished astronomers, mathematicians, and scientists. They devised a whole series of incredibly accurate calendars. They invented the concept of zero. They extended the Long count calendar more than a millennium into the future. But they die NOT predict the end of the world. To read about Maya calendars and culture, and some scientific details about the 2012 nonsense, read any of these books, all by recognized experts in the field:

Aveni, Anthony F.  (2009)  The End of Time: The Maya Mystery of 2012. University Press of Colorado, Boulder.

Restall, Matthew and Amara Solari  (2011)  2012 and the End of the World. Rowman and Littlefield, New York.

Stuart, David  (2011)  The Order of Days: The Maya world and the Truth About 2012. Random House, New York.

Van Stone, Mark  (2010)  2012: Science and Prophecy of the Ancient Maya. Tlacaelel Press (private publication, Imperial Valley, CA.

But please avoid the nonsense found in commercial books on Amazon.com. Check out the authors on the internet. The authors of the books listed above are all recognizied experts, easy to tell from a number of websites.

Aztec astronomer observes the stars

But what about the Aztecs?

It turns out that the Aztecs DID predict the end of the world. Their priests observed the heavens, and their mythology predicted the destruction of the world. This will come at the end of a 52-year calendar cycle, but we don't know which cycle! At the end of each cycle, the Aztecs would put out all their fires and wait around to see if the sun would rise again for a new period of 52 years. New fires were then lit (it was called the "New Fire Ceremony"), and the world was saved for another 52 years. The last such ceremony before Cortés arrived took place in 1507. To read more about this, check out the new 3rd edition of my book, The Aztecs, in which I've boosted the coverage of the New Fire Ceremony.

Lighting of the Aztec New Fire+

When I was an undergraduate, we extended the Aztec calendar forward (now you can do that easily on the internet; back then it was a lot of hand calculations). We discovered that there was a 52-year cycle completion in the middle of a semester! We had a blow-out, end-of-the-world party, which was fun, but the world did not end (although I think it may have felt that way the next morning). The next scheduled cycle completion will be in the year 2027.

As an Aztec specialist, this whole Maya 2012 nonsense really bugs me. The Maya always get all the publicity, and the Aztecs get very little. The Maya are always on the History Channel or in National Geographic Magazine. Maya, Maya, Maya! We Aztec specialists often get an inferiority complex with respect to the Maya.

The Aztecs actually DID predict the end of the world, but who gets all the credit for ancient prophecies for doom and destruction: the Maya, who didn't even make such prophecies.

This morning, I was interviewed on local TV about the Maya 2012 bit. I didn't get to say very much, but check out the video.