WEAVERVILLE — Maya scholar George Stuart fielded questions covering a wide variety of topics — including whether the world will end in 2012 — following his presentation on “Mayan Culture: Then and Now” on May 13 at the Weaverville Library.

Regarding a question about the Mayan calendar, Stuart said, “They just had to have some way to keep count.” Two different calendars were used, including a 360-day one that was divided into 18 months of 20 days each and a short month with five days, and a 260-day version.

The Maya calendar, according to some (especially New Age) interpretations, says the world will end on Dec. 31, 2012, but Stuart said there are more than 50 different correlations between the Maya and Christian calendars.

“You hear all this talk that the end of the world is coming in 2012 — well, no!” Stuart asserted with a grin, triggering laughter from the crowd. After a pause, he smiled and added that he does plan to throw a party on that day — just in case.

Another questioner said he had the impression that the Maya “had lots and lots of books” produced by their culture before the Spaniards arrived.

Nodding, Stuart said evenly of the conquistadors, “They burned hundreds of thousands of books.”

Another man asked when the Mayan hieroglyphic system was deciphered.

“The big breakthrough came in 1973,” Stuart replied, when sign reading began, thanks to the efforts of Peter Matthews.

He noted that “some of the Spanish sounds of letters were similar to Mayan syllables.”

As for a questioner asking for the name of “an easy book on the subject” of the Mayas, Stuart recommended “Cracking the Maya Code.”

A man asked about the heads depicted in Maya artworks, noting that many had what appeared to be African features.

“They had enormous heads” on their artworks that were disproportionate in size, but “it’s the style they carved in. There were 21 head styles.” Stuart said there was no evidence that Africans were depicted in the works. He added that Africans never had been seen in the region until after the collapse of the Maya culture, when escaped slaves fled to the area and mixed with the local populations.

A man asked how the Maya could move towering artworks — and how they could carve them, given their probable limited technological capability.

“You get a bunch of logs, a bunch of ropes and a bunch of people — and you can do (and move) most anything ... I mean they (early cultures) built Stonehenge,” a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire.

“So these folks were good at what they did,” he said of the Maya.

He noted that, at his Barnardsville home, he invites students from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa to visit each year to try using logs and ropes to move large items to get a sense of the Mayans’ accomplishments.

A woman asked if she was correct in hearing him say that “the closest correlation of Maya is to people from China and Southeast Asia.”

“There’s still a lot to learn,” Stuart replied. “There’s 6,700 known Maya sites” and only 40-plus have been closely examined.

With a grin, he said, “I like to say we don’t know diddly-squat about the Mayans.”

A man asked about the population and rule of government in Classic Mayan culture.

Each locale had a king and tribute had to be paid by his followers and conquered enemies. He also said war was virtually nonstop in Mayan cultures — and “they were always capturing prisoners.”

He added that there was “a whole royal court — just like in medieval Europe.”

At the peak of the culture, “there were millions of Mayans and the biggest cities had 125,000 to 250,000 people.”

A man asked, “What was their downfall? What caused their demise?”

“We don’t know what a demise is,” Stuart answered. “The political system changed — we don’t know why.” He told of sculptors inexplicably walking award from their works suddenly and never returning to finish them.

Regarding a question about the content of stone inscriptions on Mayan artworks, Stuart said they “were mainly self-promotions on the part of the rulers,” who were attempting — and often succeeding — to mythologize themselves as gods.

A man, who cited the work of Benjamin Wharf, asked what Stuart thought of Wharf’s effort to make a connection between the language and the worldview of a culture, particularly in reference to the Maya. Specifically, he said Wharf theorized that a spoken language reflects the way a people see the universe.

“You do get a sense of that,” Stuart said, noting that the Maya spoke of people holding up the world from below and holding up the sky from above.

A man asked, “They went on raids and took prisoners — what for?”

“Prestige,” Stuart replied.

A woman asked what happened to the Mayans in the 1980s and ‘90s.

“Well, development, particularly in Guatemala,” Stuart answered. “The Maya have really gotten short shrift in all this because they weren’t ‘producing.’ There was no money in them.”

In noting that “everything’s changing every day” everywhere, Stuart said, “Nowadays, when I go (to Maya country), it seems like there’s too many military roadblocks” for him to go through.

Stuart noted that when he travels in Maya country, he carries two sets of photographs with him — one of the president of the country he is visiting and a second set including Yasser Arafat, Daniel Ortega and Ché Guevara. He said that, depending on the security forces he is facing, he shows them the photographs of leaders they predictably would favor, adding, “I don’t want to die!” The crowd laughed at the ends to which he went to achieve smooth, safe traveling.

Stuart concluded by noting that he and his son David, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a Mayan scholar, are working on a book to be titled “Palenque: Eternal City of the Maya.”