An ancient site in Guatemala has turned up a fascinating find: the oldest known Mayan calendar.

The calendar was discovered in a complex of pyramids painted with murals that is known as San Bartolo. It was on a pyramid known as Las Pinturas that archaeologists spotted what they believe is notation for a Mayan calendar. The find was announced in a new study in Science Advances by David Stuart, Heather Hurst, and their colleagues.

The wall paintings at Las Pinturas are from the Late Preclassic period (400 BCE to 200 CE), when the Maya’s first societies were on the brink of collapse. Those societies went on to bounce back during the Classical period. It was during the Preclassic era that Mayan script systems were being developed.

Amid the hieroglyphic texts adorning the murals of Las Pinturas comes a single date: 7 Deer. This hieroglyphic is the earliest known evidence of the Mayan calendar. Much of the remaining mural was destroyed, so it is not known what the date referred to or if it was accompanied by other dates.

The Mayan calendar has 260 days, and each day is demarcated with two elements, the paper explains. The first element is a number from 1 to 13 paired with 1 of 20 days, each of which carries a name that refers to animals, the elements, and other aspects of nature.

Among the most acclaimed artists of her generation, Carrie Mae Weems first rose to fame with her groundbreaking “Kitchen Table” series (1990). For these rich black-and-white photographs, Weems created various tableaux of Black women, and sometimes men, sitting at a kitchen table.

In one image, a woman runs a hair pick through Weems’s hair, two glasses of red wine in front of them. In another, a husband and wife eat dinner, and in a third, a mother applies makeup in front of a round beauty mirror while her daughter mirrors her to the right. Though these images are staged and not strictly documentarian, they showed the ways in which a kitchen table was, is, and continues to be an important space within Black American homes.

In the years since, Weems has continued to ponder what it means to be a Black woman living in this world today, whether by standing in front of major museums, which have historically been repositories of colonial plunder, or by grieving the young Black men and women who have been murdered by the state.

Her genre-defying work moves between installation, performance, and film and video. More recently, Weems has also begun to organize what she calls “convenings,” multiday symposia that gather top intellectuals, writers, poets, and artists.

Weems was last the subject of a career retrospective, “Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video,” when it opened at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville in 2012. The exhibition traveled to four other venues, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2014; she made history then as the first African American artist to have ever mounted a retrospective at the Guggenheim since its founding in 1939.

West Ham gave Brassell’s Lyon a battering last night! And Stanley Tucci couldn’t do a thing about it. 

Marcus, Luke and Andy discuss a bustling night of European football on today’s Preview Show, sponsored by Betway! The Ferryman’s European tour continues and Rangers almost manage - in the words of the great Terry Brown - to stab themselves in the foot.

Elsewhere, a huge weekend beckons for Crystal Palace and we react to the day’s big news: Sean Dyche is gone!

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