A once-anonymous Maya scientist now has a name: Sak Tahn Waax, or “White-Chested Fox,” is credited as the author of a calendrical formula painted in Maya glyphs on the wall of a ruin in Guatemala, researchers report July 14 in Antiquity. The table of dates and calculations, recorded more than 1,200 years ago, lays out relationships among the cycling positions of Venus and Mars and several cycles of the Maya calendar over an eight-year span.
While the names of other Maya luminaries are known — rulers are often named in writings and on monuments, and some artists signed their works — this is the first known name of a Maya mathematician-astronomer. Maya texts related historical events and natural cycles, and “individuals like Sak Tahn Waax were not only observing these cycles but linking them with each other,” says MIT archaeologist Franco Rossi. “It is frankly surprising that more such signatures haven’t turned up.”
The name and table were discovered at Xultun, an archaeological site near Guatemala’s borders with Mexico and Belize. They consist of an inverted L-shape of 11 blocks of elaborate Maya glyphs: The top nine blocks record five Maya calendar dates and the intervals between them, and the last two are the “signature” of Sak Tahn Waax — a presentation that implies White-Chested Fox claimed credit or was being credited for the work, Rossi and his colleagues say.
The Somnium Project 
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