End of the World Postponed?

Maybe the world won’t end in December after all.  An associate professor at UC Santa Barbara says that interpretations of the Mayan calendar, which predict the end of the world this December, could be off anywhere from sixty days to three years.

Research conducted by Gerardo Aldana, associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara, suggests that the GMT constant –– which has never actually been proved conclusively –– could be inaccurate by 50 to 100 years, or more. Aldana’s findings challenge the accepted Gregorian dates of all Classic Mayan historical events, as well as the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it 2012 prophecies. His research is included in “Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World” (Oxbow Books, 2010), the second in a series edited by John Steele, associate professor of Egyptology and Ancient West Asian Studies at Brown University.

Aldana’s research, in general, focuses on reconstructing Mayan astronomical practices, which for the most part can be recovered from their applications. Most of the data found in the archeological record amount to ritual events timed by astronomical phenomena; architecture oriented to observable astronomical events; or numerology tying together science, history, and religion with hieroglyphic inscriptions carved in stone.

“One of the principal complications is that there are really so few scholars who know the astronomy, the epigraphy, and the archeology,” said Aldana. “Because there are so few people who are working on that, you get people who don’t see the full scope of the problem. And because they don’t see the full scope, they buy things they otherwise wouldn’t. It’s a fun problem.”