About Me

I'm a PhD student researching the role of the archaeological dead in contemporary British society. Think of this as a scrapbook of all the interesting links, snippets of information and random bits and bobs I come across pertaining to death, dying and the dead. Enjoy?!

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    Mexico's Mayan region launches apocalypse countdown

    Only 52 weeks and a day are left before Dec. 21, 2012, when some believe the Maya predicted the end of the world.

    Unlike enthusiasts of other doomsday theories who suggest putting together survival kits, southeastern Mexico, the heart of Maya territory, plans a yearlong celebration.

    Mexico’s tourism agency expects to draw 52 million visitors by next year only to the regions of Chiapas, Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Campeche. All of Mexico usually lures about 22 million foreigners in a year.

    It’s selling the date, the Winter Solstice in the coming year, as a time of renewal. Many archeologists argue that the 2012 reference on a 1,300-year-old stone tablet only marks the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar.

    “The world will not end. It is an era,” said Yeanet Zaldo, a tourism spokeswoman for the Caribbean state of Quintana Roo, home to Cancun. “For us, it is a message of hope.”

    Cities and towns in the Mayan region on Wednesday will start the yearlong countdown. In Chiapas the town of Tapachula on the Guatemalan border will start a countdown on an 8-foot digital clock in the main park exactly a year before the mysterious date.

    Hopefully, I *will* make it to Mexico this year (hurricanes and personal disasters pending…) and I shall look forward to seeing this!

    Mayan documentary to show 'evidence' of alien contact in ancient Mexico

    The ancient Mayans had contact with alien visitors who left behind evidence of their existence, according to a new Mexican documentary.

    Sundance winner Juan Carlos Rulfo’s Revelations of the Mayans 2012 and Beyond is currently in production for release next year to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar, reports the Wrap.

    Producer Raul Julia-Levy said the documentary-makers were working in cooperation with the Mexican government for what he said was “the good of mankind”. He said the order to collaborate had come directly from the country’s president, Álvaro Colom Caballeros.

    “Mexico will release codices, artefacts and significant documents with evidence of Mayan and extraterrestrial contact, and all of their information will be corroborated by archaeologists,” he said. “The Mexican government is not making this statement on their own – everything we say, we’re going to back it up.”

    Caballeros himself was conspicuous by his absence from the statement released by Julia-Levy. So far, the minister of tourism for the Mexican state of Campeche, Luis Augusto García Rosado, appears to be the highest-ranking government official to go on record confirming the discovery of extraterrestrial life, but he’s not holding back.

    In a statement, Rosado spoke of contact “between the Mayans and extraterrestrials, supported by translations of certain codices, which the government has kept secure in underground vaults for some time”. In a telephone conversation with the Wrap, he also spoke of “landing pads in the jungle that are 3,000 years old”.

    The documentary is believed to focus in part on previously unexplored sections of a Mayan site at Calakmul, Mexico, as well as a number of sites in Guatemala, where officials are also backing the documentary.

    “Guatemala, like Mexico, home to the ancient-yet-advanced Mayan civilisation … has also kept certain provocative archeological discoveries classified, and now believes that it is time to bring forth this information in the new documentary,” Guatemala’s minister of tourism, Guillermo Novielli Quezada, said in a statement.

    The Mayan calendar ends on 21 December 2012, a fact which conspiracy theorists have used to predict imminent apocalypse. However, according to Mayanist scholars there is no evidence that the Mayans themselves expected cataclysmic events to occur once the calendar had reached its denouement. More likely, it would simply mark the beginning of another 5,125-year-long cycle.

    Landing pads in the jungle?! Oh, COME ON! I have to say that I am absolutely dreading the arrival of 2012. Not because it’s THE END OF THE WORLD (pffft!), but because no doubt we will have to put up with a whole year of morons spouting Erich von Daniken-tastic rubbish like this. Seriously, stick a sock in it - it’s embarrassing.

    In spite of this, I really do hope the documentary gets a UK release because I am intrigued to see just which ‘archaeologists’ are prepared to stand up and destroy their academic credibility in one fell swoop. A career in ruins…? Bwahahahaha! *groans* 

    As you may be able to tell, this extraterrestrial contact business reeeeeeally gets my goat. I just feel that it only serves to belittle the remarkable achievements of the human species and is a huge insult to the intelligence of past peoples. End of rant.