Archaeologists at Xultun in Guatemala have made the first Maya astronomer and mathematician identified by name, reading 11 hieroglyphs as Sak Tahn Waax, or “White-chested Fox.” The find ties a named person to mathematical microtexts and equations about Venus and Mars preserved on a wall in structure 10K-2.
David Stuart, an archaeologist and epigrapher at the University of Texas at Austin, said Maya astronomy had long lived in obscurity. “In a real way, we’re looking at an old ‘whiteboard’ in someone’s abandoned office.”
Xultun wall texts
The decipherment came from more than 50 faint mathematical microtexts on and etched into the wall at Xultun. The team says the reading of the 11 hieroglyphs points to Sak Tahn Waax and places that name beside calculations tied to Venus and Mars. That makes the wall texts at Xultun more than anonymous notation: they now carry a named individual attached to the work.
Heather Hurst, an archaeologist at Skidmore College and director of the San Bartolo-Xultun Project, said, “It's this whole entire tradition that comes to life with a single individual.” Anthony Aveni, an archaeoastronomer at Colgate University, said, “I've been doing archaeoastronomy all my life, and it's probably the most wonderful discovery leading to an understanding of Maya science.”
Maxwell Chamberlain in 2010
The wall texts sit inside a site with a longer excavation history. Xultun was originally reported in 1915, and more recent research began in 2008. In 2010, Maxwell Chamberlain, then working with William Saturno at Xultun, poked his head into a looting tunnel and found that it cut directly through a small rectangular room measuring six square feet.
That room had been deliberately filled with mud and rock before the Maya built new structures around it, and excavations later revealed murals of royal scribes working away inside it. The room and the wall texts now anchor the identification of Sak Tahn Waax, a figure the researchers describe as the first and only known Maya astronomer-mathematician credited for work of this kind.
Antiquity publication
The findings were published Monday in Antiquity. The attribution gives historians of Maya science a named individual to attach to a rare body of astronomical and mathematical writing at Xultun, including equations about the planetary movements of Venus and Mars. It also narrows the next question: whether Sak Tahn Waax wrote the equations himself, whether someone else attached his name to them, or whether he claimed work done by subordinates.
For readers, the change is specific. A set of texts that once read as collective technical knowledge at Xultun now carries a personal name, and that shift makes the wall less like an anonymous archive and more like the work of one identifiable Maya scholar.
