I've read some interviews with mayan descents. All them deny this apocalyptic prophecy, and some of them even seem offended by the way the west makes financial profit by spreading lies about their cultural heritage, and I can't help but agree in this. Cultural imperialism if you will.
This whole 2012 seems to have been started by some amateurish archeologists 1960's, and been kept alive by the new age community since.
It is based on a simple misinterpretation, analogous to claiming that the world will end in the year of 9999, because there are no more decimal spaces left. Any sensible person immediately notice the possibility to expand the number to 5 decimal spaces, making the following year 10 000.
The mayans organized time in a way similar to our, but instead of using 12 months a year, ten years a decade, hundred years a century and thousand years a millennium, they had 360 days a tun, 20 tuns a katun and 20 katuns a baktun, making a baktun 144 000 days. Many inscriptions indicate the maximum amount of baktuns to be 13, equivalent of ~5125,36332 years. Using some calculations I don't care to elaborate on it has been found that what the mayans considered to be the beginning of time is equivalent to our 11th or 13th of August 3114 BCE. Adding things up you will end up with the dates 21st and 23rd of December 2012. One little problem with this is that time wasn't measured in this way across the mayan empire, different areas had different ways to divide and organize tuns, katuns and baktuns. Additionally, as I mentioned before, there is no reason to believe that when 13 baktuns were reached they wouldn't simply just begin on a new one. In fact inscriptions found at Coba indicate that in fact 20 successive baktuns were possible, making the end of the calendar not to appear before year 4e28 or so.
Another thing worth noting is that the word apocalypse, and what we associate with it is completely a western invention, and has nothing to do with the Maya.
