Further Evidence for a Dec 2012 End Date
I find it a little odd, but not at all surprising, that 2012 debunkers are now seizing on evidence that Dec 21 2012 was the end of the Long Count calendar (now that the world didn’t end). Of course last year that were latching on to anything that suggested 2012 was not the year.
For me though, nothing has changed. 21 Dec 2012 is still the date, and IMHO we are still close enough to that date for it to be proven correct. Hopefully not.
An example of the confusion this has caused is the date of a decisive battle that shaped the course of Mayan civilisation. It occurred 1,390,838 days from the start of the count, but attempts to transcribe this into the European calendar have given estimates that vary by hundreds of years.
Anthropologists led by Douglas Kennett at Pennsylvania State University took a sample from a carved wooden lintel found at a temple in the city of Tikal. The carvings recount the key event when Tikal’s king, Jasaw Chan K’awiil I, defeated Yich’aak K’ahk, known as ”Claw of Fire”, who headed a rival kingdom at Calakmul, 90 kilometres away.
Using a technique called accelerator mass spectrometry, the team concluded the tree was cut down and carved about AD658-696. The estimate closely matches that of a decades-old benchmark for Mayan dating, the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson method, which put the battle at about AD695-712.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/beam-holds-clue-to-mayan-calendar-20130412-2hqqu.html#ixzz2RAAj4jWg
The tree wasn’t necessarily carved immediately after it was chopped down, so it is a very good fit.
I still have your blog in my Google Reader and I was waiting to see how long it would take for you to hook up on this (over a week too late). I am just curious who those 2012 debunkers are that you are referring to?
No, this study does not prove that the “end” occurred on December 21, 2012. It only proves that the GMT-family of correlations are more probable than others (nothing new, carbon dating has been done before). To show which correlation is the correct one you need other data and it is most likely that a combination of GMT+2 and GMT+3 is the correct use.
Distance numbers from many monuments indicate that the Long Count will continue for a long time.
You may also ask why a study like this is published? My guess is that since Kennett and others are on the “climate-change-caused-the-Maya-collapse” bandwagon they need the GMT correlation(s) to be accurate. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, they leave out the carbon dated lintels from Chichen Itza and other lintels at Tikal that do not confirm this study (in Chichen’s case it is off by two centuries…).
I look forward to see what will be the next straw you will grasp.