Archaeologists Decipher the Name of the First Known Maya Astronomer

For all the sophistication of Maya astronomy and mathematics, one thing had always been missing, a name. Unlike Greek astronomy, which handed down Ptolemy, Hipparchus, and Eratosthenes for later generations to credit, no comparable figure had ever surfaced from the Maya archaeological record. That has now changed.

Multispectral imaging of the inscription. Image credit: G. Ware, H. Hurst, and F. D. Rossi.

Archaeologists working at the site of Xultun in Guatemala have deciphered the signature of an eighth-century Maya mathematician and astronomer, a man named Sak Tahn Waax, or White-Chested Fox, the first named scientist ever identified from the pre-Columbian Americas.

The discovery is detailed in a paper titled “The Identification and Work of an Eighth-Century Maya Mathematician,” published in the journal Antiquity by Franco D. Rossi of MIT, David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin, and Heather Hurst of Skidmore College, director of the San Bartolo-Xultun Project.

An old whiteboard, rediscovered

The room where the signature was found is not new to archaeology. In 2010, excavations at Xultun, an ancient Maya city roughly 340 kilometers southwest of Guatemala City, uncovered a small rectangular building known as Structure 10K-2, its walls covered in painted figures alongside more than 50 faint mathematical and astronomical microtexts, essentially a working record of calculations rather than a finished monument. Researchers have described the room evocatively as an old whiteboard left behind in someone’s abandoned office, a space where the mathematics was clearly being worked out rather than formally displayed.

(a) Artist’s reconstruction of Structure 10K-2, showing the painted figures on the north and east walls and the location of the signed mathematical formula discussed in the text. (b) Text 19 as it appeared on the east wall of Structure 10K-2. Image credit: F. D. Rossi and H. Hurst.

It took years of further study to notice that one of those calculations carried something none of the others did, an attribution. Using multispectral imaging to recover text that had faded nearly to invisibility, the team identified a specific inscription, labeled Text 19, on the room’s east wall. At its end sat two final glyphs reading che-he-na, meaning so says, immediately followed by a name spelled SAK-TAHN-wa-xi. Because the name lacked the grammatical prefix that would mark it as feminine, researchers could determine it belonged to a man.

Math good enough to sign

What makes the formula worth signing becomes clear once you see what it actually does. Sak Tahn Waax’s calculation weaves together several of the Maya calendar’s separate cycles, the 260-day ritual day-count, the solar year, and the movements of Venus and Mars, syncing them together in a way the researchers describe as a genuinely new approach to tracking planetary motion. In the Classic Maya period, dates tied to celestial movements carried real weight, used to schedule royal ceremonies and time major building projects, so getting this kind of calculation right mattered well beyond the room where it was worked out.

Hurst put the significance simply. It is really elegant, complex math, she said, and that complexity is precisely why its author chose to sign it. She has also described the room’s rough calculations and tables as comparable to finding an early draft of a famous manuscript, or a sketch preceding a finished work of art, evidence of the process behind the achievement rather than only its polished result.

Attribution of the mathematician “White-chested Fox,” using the phrase che-he-na, followed by the name spelled SAK-TAHN-wa-xi. Image credit: G. Ware and D. Stuart.

The first named scientist of the Americas

The significance of the find goes well beyond one formula. Maya ceramics and carved monuments frequently carry the signatures of artists, scribes, and sculptors, and stelae across the Maya world commonly name the political figures and warriors they commemorate. Nothing comparable had ever turned up for the scholars behind Maya computational timekeeping, as Rossi noted, until this single inscription broke that pattern.

Stuart, who has spent his career studying Maya writing, called the discovery incredibly important for how the Maya are understood as a civilization steeped in genuine scientific inquiry. The Maya, he said, were keen observers of nature who were constantly looking for patterns and connections, exactly like any scientist working today. Having an actual name attached to that tradition, he added, makes Maya science feel considerably more human. Stuart also pointed to other examples of Maya personal names as context, noting that a sixth-century Maya ruler was known as K’ahk’ujol K’inich, meaning Fiery Is the Head of the Serpent God, part of a broader naming tradition Sak Tahn Waax’s own name now extends into the realm of science specifically.

Hurst placed the discovery in an even longer historical lineage, suggesting history can now count Sak Tahn Waax alongside figures like Pythagoras, Galileo, and Newton. What excites her, she said, is that an entire scientific tradition comes alive through the recovery of a single individual’s name.

An extraordinary find, outside experts agree

Researchers not involved in the study were quick to register its significance. Tomás Barrientos, head of the archaeology department at the University of the Valley of Guatemala, called the find extraordinary, saying it gives a face to Maya science for the first time. Gerardo Aldana, an anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, made a related point to Nature, noting that the fact the writer chose to be named suggests Maya mathematicians were recognized within their society much the way artists already were known to be.

Some questions remain genuinely open. Researchers cannot yet say for certain whether Sak Tahn Waax personally worked out the calculations bearing his name, whether someone else transcribed them and credited him directly, or whether he was simply claiming intellectual credit for work carried out by subordinates. What the inscription does establish beyond doubt is that a specific individual, working roughly 1,200 years ago in a small room in Guatemala, wanted history to know his name was attached to an elegant piece of mathematics, and after more than a millennium, it finally does.

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Sources. Nature; Science (AAAS); National Geographic; Scientific American; The Art Newspaper; ScienceAlert; Phys.org. Rossi, F.D., Stuart, D., and Hurst, H. (2026). “The Identification and Work of an Eighth-Century Maya Mathematician.” Antiquity, 1 to 16. doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2026.10378