OCR Text |
Show Tree Rings May Solve Mayan Calendar Puzzle Washington. Tree rings of the Southwest are now expected to solve the puzzle of the Mayan calendar, enabling archeologists at last to date the magnificent ancient civilization civili-zation that flourished in the American Amer-ican tropics before Columbus. New discoveries in Mayan ruins in Guatemala, which bring the solution solu-tion definitely nearer, were announced an-nounced here by Dr. A. V. Kidder, archeologist of the Carnegie institution insti-tution of Washington. Dr. Kidder, who led the institution's latest expedition ex-pedition to Guatemala, told of finding find-ing pottery there, which was clearly clear-ly brought down to the Mayan cities by Toltec Indian traders from their own great city of Teotihuacan, far to the north near Mexico City. Dr. Kidder finds that these Mayas and the Toltecs who traded with them were living either about 700 A. D. or 950 A. D., but which century cen-tury is correct, archeologists cannot can-not agree. It is the two conflicting ways of translating Mayan dates into in-to our modern calendar, one shifting Mayan history about 250 years later than the other, that Dr. Kidder now sees hope of straightening out. Archeologists must now seek the missing link, Dr. Kidder foresees, to settle the Mayan civilization In historic centuries. And that link is pottery or some other trade object linking these Toltecs with the southwestern south-western United States, where pueblos pueb-los built by Indians are precisely dated in centuries, and even exact years, by means of the tree ring calendar evolved by science. |