The San Bartolo Murals Preserve the Earliest Dated Maya Writing
A fragment of painted plaster records a day in the 260-day calendar, the oldest securely dated piece of Maya script ever found
Quick facts
- Site
- San Bartolo, Peten, Guatemala
- Structure
- Las Pinturas pyramid
- Earliest glyph found
- '7 Deer,' a Tzolk'in day name
What happened
Archaeologists excavating the Las Pinturas pyramid complex at San Bartolo, Guatemala, found painted mural fragments in a sealed early construction phase that a team led by William Saturno dated to between 300 and 200 BCE. One fragment carries a glyphic date recorded as '7 Deer,' a day name from the 260-day divinatory calendar (the Tzolk'in) still used by Maya daykeepers today. A 2022 study in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, co-authored by epigraphers including David Stuart, described this as the earliest securely dated example of Maya writing, alongside ten other text fragments that show multiple scribal hands already at work. The famous full-color murals depicting Maya creation mythology at San Bartolo, discovered in 2001, come from a later construction phase roughly 150 years afterward.
Why it matters
This pushes the origin of a working Maya script and calendar system back earlier than scholars had confirmed, showing that Maya writing was already established with trained scribes by the Late Preclassic rather than emerging only in the Classic period cities that get more attention. It is the ancestor system behind every later inscription at Tikal, Palenque, and Copan.
How we know
The fragments were recovered from a sealed architectural context in an early phase of the Las Pinturas pyramid, dated through stratigraphy and radiocarbon evidence, and the glyphic reading was confirmed by specialists in Maya epigraphy.
Sources
- Saturno, Stuart, Aveni, Rossi et al., Science Advances (PMC). An early Maya calendar record from San Bartolo, Guatemala · Peer-reviewed (author-declared)pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · Cited as a "journal" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Alvin Powell, Harvard Gazette. Oldest Mayan Mural Found by Peabody Researcher · Reputable sourcenews.harvard.edu · The domain "news.harvard.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineThe Maya Civilization25 events · How villages in the Guatemalan jungle grew into rival kingdoms with the most advanced writing and astronomy in the pre-Columbian Americas, and why the last free Maya city held out against Spain until 1697View all →