Friday, June 04, 2010

art historian prevents end of world

...or at least makes the Mayan case against that end falling in December of 2012 (with all due respect to John Cusack).  At the recommendation of Meso-American experts, I used the FAMSI site extensively when teaching art history 101 - it's a reputable academic outfit.  The thesis appears to be that we have very fragmentary Mayan calendrial evidence, and, furthermore, Mayan concepts of time and the Mayan pantheon were both vastly different than the Judeo-Christian western arrangement.  This makes the 2012 doomsday prophecies a deeply western, American, nearly evangelical (downright Lindseyan) projection onto a completely foreign cosmology.  It takes me back to the ol' Pinchbeck debates.