Archaeologists decipher the name of a Maya astronomer for the first time

Archaeologists exploring the Maya ruins of Xultun in Guatemala have, for the first time, deciphered the name of an ancient Maya astronomer-mathematician: Sak Tahn Waax, or “White-chested Fox.”

Maya astronomers have long lived in obscurity, uncredited for their science, says National Geographic Explorer David Stuart, an archaeologist and epigrapher at the University of Texas at Austin, who helped make the find.

“Now we have a name,” he says.

The discovery is based on a set of 11 hieroglyphs found amid more than 50 faint mathematical “microtexts” painted on and etched into a wall in a small rectangular room at Xultun called structure 10K-2. The researchers found the name along with equations about the planetary movements of Venus and Mars that appear to be attributed to him, making it the first and only known example of a Maya astronomer-mathematician credited for their work. The finding provides unprecedented insight into the work of one of the working scholars of Indigenous astronomy and mathematics in ancient Mesoamerica.  

“In a real way, we’re looking at an old ‘whiteboard’ in someone’s abandoned office,” says Stuart. “To have a name associated with it is incredible and makes Maya science appear much more human.”

They published their findings Monday in the journal Antiquity.

(The Maya civilization was a mystery. Our family business was solving it.)

History can now count Sak Tahn Waax among other influential astronomers and mathematicians such as Pythagoras, Galileo, and Newton, says Heather Hurst, a National Geographic Explorer, archaeologist at Skidmore College in New York, and director of the San Bartolo-Xultun Project at the site.

“It's this whole entire tradition that comes to life with a single individual,” she says.

While it’s still not clear whether Sak Tahn Waax wrote the equations himself, someone else wrote them on the wall and attributed the work to him, or if he simply claimed the work of his subordinates, his name reflects a long line of expert Maya astronomer-mathematicians decoding the stars.

“I've been doing archaeoastronomy all my life, and it's probably the most wonderful discovery leading to an understanding of Maya science,” says Anthony Aveni, an archaeoastronomer at Colgate University in New York. Aveni previously worked with Stuart analyzing astronomical tables from Xultun in 2012, but was not involved with the recent work. “That makes me feel pretty good as a fellow astronomer.”

An astronomer's signature

In 2010, Maxwell Chamberlain, a curious undergraduate student at Boston University, was working with National Geographic Explorer William Saturno at Xultun when he decided to poke his head into a looting tunnel bored through an inconspicuous mound.

The shaft, he quickly discovered, cut directly through a small rectangular room with traces of an elaborately decorated wall. The room measures six square feet and was deliberately infilled with mud and rock before the Maya built new structures around it. Excavations soon revealed exquisitely preserved murals of royal scribes diligently working away, as National Geographic reported in 2012.

Xultun (pronounced shool-toon) is an ancient Maya city, some 25 miles northeast of the famous ancient city-state of Tikal, that thrived during the Maya Classic Period from 250 to 900 CE. It was originally reported in 1915 but has seen little archaeological excavation until more recent research began in 2008. In total, the site stretches over six square miles and is replete with monuments and temples—some of which stand as tall as 115 feet. 

“It's one of these big sites that no one ever heard of,” says Franco Rossi, an archaeologist at MIT and lead author of the paper.

Prior research dated the materials within the 10K-2 structure to the second half of the 8th century, suggesting its inhabitants worked before the so-called “Maya collapse,” which saw widespread depopulation and migration across much of the Maya world.

One day, Rossi was pondering a faint scrawl on the room’s east wall. The text was below a large set of Maya hieroglyphs that had yet to be decoded. After mulling over the text using various software programs that can tweak shading and color, he had an epiphany: he could be looking at a name.

“You can look at some of these texts forever, and it won't click,” says Rossi. “Then, one day you see it, and it just clicks.”

The key was the final two glyphs in a cluster of 11. The first said “che-he-na,” or “cheheen,” roughly meaning “so says.” Then followed by a personal signature.

After much deliberation, they settled on the name Sak Tahn Waax, which roughly translates to “White-chested Fox.”

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“The name itself is fairly simple—not the sort of pompous-sounding name we often see applied to Maya kings or high members of the royal family,” says Stuart. One 6th-century Maya ruler, he says, was named K’ahk’ujol K’inich, which means “Fiery is the head of the serpent god.” Sak Than Waax provides a rare look at how ancient Maya professionals were named, he adds.

But beyond the name, the text revealed that Sak Tahn Waax was attributed to the markings. “It kind of lit a fire, and we all started digging into it,” says Rossi.

Solving a celestial equation

With a name in hand, Rossi and his colleagues knew the mystery hieroglyphs attributed to the signature were important, but they did not know exactly what they meant. Now began the harder work of deciphering the rest of his text.

After several multi-hour sessions decoding the faint dots, bars, and symbols, they found the markings were carefully calibrated equations that uniquely combine cycles of Mars and Venus—one of the favorite pastimes of Maya astronomers. This work specifically aimed to determine how to reach a 2,920-day period, which, in its simplest form, represents five cycles of Venus orbiting the Sun. Working backward from the dates in the equations, the researchers dated the formula to AD 781.

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“There were no nouns, there were no verbs; it wasn't saying something about an event,” says Hurst. “It was just pure math.”

Astronomical observations like these were inextricable from Maya life and religion. The ancient Maya tracked the cycles of the visible planets in our solar system and even arranged their temples and other monumental architecture to align with important events such as the equinoxes. Stone monuments regularly depict “Long Counts,” which are dates calculated thousands of years into the future based on observations of celestial cycles.

“They did it without the aid of telescopes, without the aid of computers, without the aid of technology,” says Aveni. 

Sak Tahn Waax’s work seems to parallel the ancient Maya’s famous bark-based books, such as the Dresden Codex — lengthy compendiums of science and math describing everything from medicines to precise dates for lunar eclipses — some of which would be developed hundreds of years later. The room with his equations was likely a workshop where Maya astronomers labored to document the mechanics of the stars, drafting and collaborating to hash out the details before committing them to their elaborate codices.

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Archaeologists have known that the Maya observed solar equinoxes and recorded movements of celestial bodies for hundreds of years before the hieroglyphs were painted on the wall in Xultun with Sak Tahn Waax’s signature, according to Hurst.

“But to connect it to a name,” she says, "these are the moments that connect us all to the humanity of our ancestors.”