William Andrew "Bill" Saturno (born Albany, New York) is an American archaeologist and Mayanist scholar who has made significant contributions toward the study of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. Saturno is a former director of the Proyecto San Bartolo-Xultun at the Instito de Antropologia e Historia in Guatemala, a former national space research scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Center, and a research associate at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. Saturno has previously worked as an Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Boston University and MIT and as a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire. Saturno is best known for his discovery in 2001 of one of the oldest extant murals in the Maya region, at the site of San Bartolo in northeastern Guatemala. He said this discovery was his favorite and most challenging experience of his career, and that "being the first person to see [the murals] after more than 2,000 years, uncovering them bit by bit, with each part more beautiful than the last, is an experience unlikely to be matched." In 2010, Saturno and Franco D. Rossi discovered what they believe to be a workroom of a Xultún record keeper. The Mayan hieroglyphics at the site included representations of dates roughly 7,000 years in the future, casting doubt on the speculation that the conclusion of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar would result in a 2012 doomsday scenario. His current research interests are New World and Mesoamerican civilizations, landscape archaeology, remote sensing, geographic information systems (GIS) applied to archaeology, Mesoamerican iconography and religion, the evolution of complex societies, and archaeology in pop culture. Saturno (as of 2022) works as an independent scholar, continuing to publish research with members of the San Bartolo-Xultun Regional Archaeolgical Project (PRASBX). He also provides insight to participants on National Geographic tours around the world. History and personal life Saturno wanted to be an archaeologist from his early childhood, and first became interested in the ancient Maya civilization when he visited the Maya site of Palenque while working in Mexico. Having worked in archaeology for over 20 years, in an interview with National Geographic he stated: "I see being an archaeologist as both a great privilege and a great responsibility. I have been entrusted with the recovery, interpretation, and preservation of the material remains of the past, with the history of an ancient people, and the heritage of a modern one." For the last