New York -- Archaeologists have found a small room in Mayan ruins in Guatemala that apparently served as a workshop for royal scribes.
The scribes evidently used the walls like a blackboard to keep track of astronomical records and the society's intricate calendar some 1,200 years ago.
The walls reveal the oldest known astronomical tables from the Maya.
The Mayan calendar has gotten some attention lately because of doomsday warnings that it predicts the end of the world this December. Experts say it makes no such prediction.
The new finding provides a bit of backup: The calculations include a time span longer than 6,000 years, implying that the Maya expected the world to go on well beyond 2012.
