T'zi' is a day in the sacred calendar when the sun climbs over a hillside ceremony. She counts to 13 in K'iche', an Indigenous Maya language with more than 1 million present-day speakers, before she gives a speech. A small group of onlookers nod along, from grandmothers in traditional dresses to visiting school children. The crowd joins a counterclockwise procession around a fire at the mouth of a cave, shuffle dancing to the beat of three men playing music while they toss offerings of candles, copal, and incense to the wind.
The 260-day cycle that informs Maya ritual life is tracked by a lawyer named Poz Salanic. In April, archaeologists announced they had deciphered a 2300-year-old inscription bearing a date in this same calendar format, which proves it was used by the historic Maya who lived across southeastern Mexico and Central America. The Maya calendar was a constant in small villages.
Roberto Pérez, the daykeeper's father, says that "everything we did today would have been called witchcraft back in the 1990s."
The 260-day calendar is a still-spinning engine within a large machine of Maya knowledge that broke down the natural world and human existence into interlocking, gearlike cycles of days. Maya astronomer described the movements of the Sun, Moon, and planets with world-leading precision, for example tracking the waxing and waning of the Moon to the half-hour.
The table of dates in a rare Maya text that tracked the movements of Venus in the 260-day calendar was discovered in the 19th century. There is still a lot of research going on into Maya astronomy. Researchers looked through the Maya script to find references to the universe. The field spawned a fringe of New Age groups, as well as a racist insinuation that the Maya must have had help from aliens.
The clearest picture of the stars has been restored in the past few years. Many of the ceremonial complexes buried under jungle and dirt seem to be related to astronomy. Archaeologists have excavated a workshop that looks like an astronomer's office. Today's Maya are also included in some Western scholars' work. They want to know why the Maya astronomer did what they did.
Some present-day Maya want the collaborations to help recover their heritage. In Zunil, members of the Poz Salanic family are looking for old sky knowledge. Tepeu Poz Salanic is a graphic designer and a daykeeper. You have to do it with care because it has been a long time since you last slept.
The Maya were extirpated by the conquerors after the Spanish arrived. The priests burned Maya texts, which were accordion-folded books of bark paper called codices, painted densely with illustrations and hieroglyphs. A priest in Yucatn said they found a lot of books. They regretted burning them all because they didn't have anything in which to be seen as good or evil. Four of the precolonial volumes were found in foreign cities.
At the end of the 19th century, a codex fell into the hands of a German mathematician named Frstemann. He could not figure out the hieroglyphs, but he was able to decipher the numbers.
The dates were part of the sacred cycle. The table had to be a guide to the motions of the planet Venus, which goes through a four-part dance in which it appears as the morning star, disappears from the sky, and reappears as the evening star.
Since then, researchers studying the codices and stone inscriptions at archaeological sites have realized that pre-colonial Maya may have aligned buildings to point at particular sunrises, and that they may have inscribed the phases of the sun and moon.
Scholars don't have a lot of evidence of each practice but they do have a glimpse of customs that have existed for thousands of years. The archaeological evidence shows that between 2000 and 3000 years ago, the Maya communities embraced a set of mathematical concepts that influenced personal rituals and public life.
The goal was to measure the flow of time This is the earliest period of the 260-day cycle. It could be the approximate interval between a missed period and childbirth, how long it takes maize to grow, or the product of 20, the fingers-plus-toes base of Maya math, but no one knows for sure.
The Maya invented a yearlong solar calendar that would have been useful for planting corn in the summer. The Maya had begun to track a third calendar called the Long Count, a cumulative, ongoing record of days elapsed since the calendar's zero date in 3 114 B.C.E.
The crumbled architecture of the Maya world may hold some of these ideas. At the site of Chichén Itz in Mexico, there is a statue of a snake at the foot of a staircase. When night and day are the same length, the Sun creates a diamondback pattern of shadows down the stairs.
A shadow is cast for a few days before and after the spring and autumn equinoxes. Proponents cannot prove that the 10th century builders intended to mark this day.
According to Ivan prajc, an archaeologist at the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies in Slovenia, the reality is that for any alignment you can find some astrological correlation. Maya scholars are now looking for cases in which statistical weight from many sites adds credibility to the links.
Dappled light filters through the tree canopy at Tak'alik Ab'aj, the ruins of a pre- Maya city that was laid out in a neat grid. There is a fragment of a Long Count date that was excavated in 1989.
Christa Schieber de Lavarreda, the site's archaeological director, points to a flat stone, thought to be an altar, found face-up just a few feet away. Its surface is covered with carvings of bare feet and toe pads, as if a person stood there and sank in a few centimeters. She says it's very ergonomics. She says that if someone stood in those prints, they would have seen the sun rise over the horizon on the winter solstice.
Zunil daykeepers and other Indigenous groups have the right to conduct ceremonies at sacred sites like this.
There are more clues to ancient astronomy in the city. Maya city planners are said to have followed a common style for more than 1000 years. There is a platform on the eastern side of the plaza with a higher structure in the middle. There is a pyramid on the western side that has a temple on it.
Archeologists began to climb up the pyramids in the early mornings in the 1920s to look at the rising Sun over the platform.
The idea is supported by a stream of data. He used lidar, a laser technology that is sensitive to the faint footprints of ruins now buried under forest and earth, to measure 71 of the plazas he analyzed in the year 2020. A person standing on the central pyramids would see the sunrise over the middle structure of the platform twice a year: 12 February and 30 October. The sunrises could have been marked with public gatherings or used as a starting point for planting or harvesting.
Research shows that designers of older architecture shared the same view of the world. In 2020, Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona found 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299 888-353-1299s Before archaeological records of Maya writing and calendar systems, the structure was reported in Nature. The raised outlines of the pyramid and platform are thought to be a solar marker.
Inomata used lidar to identify 478 smaller rectangular complexes of similar age scattered across Veracruz and Tabasco, many of which have similar orientations to sunrises. Inomata is reanalyzing the lidar maps to see what sunrises people at those places might have seen.
More inscriptions are used by scholars for later periods of Maya history. Generations of Maya spent a lot of time calculating the dates of new and full Moons during the Classic Period, which spanned most of the first millennium C.E. At Copan in modern-day Honduras and surrounding cities, early 20th century archaeologists found engravings that record one formula for tracking the Moon that is only off by about 30 seconds per month.
Recent discoveries focused on the astronomer themselves. In Xultn, a wall mural depicts a group of scholars meeting with the ruler. On nearby walls and over the mural itself, scholars scribbled the same kind of lunar calculations as in Palenque; one even appeared to have signed their name underneath a block of math. A skeleton of a man wearing the uniform depicted in the mural was buried under the floor of the apparent Moon- tracking workshop.
The Xultn mural and other clues point to a network of scholars who served in the royal courts of the Classic Period. These specialists tracked and communicated with the stars and planets and generated reams of paper calculations. Stuart says that the records show the existence of libraries of records of astronomical patterns.
Modern scholars say that Classic Period rulers used their Astrotheologians to project legitimacy. The rulers presented themselves as being part of the universe and performing rituals to keep time going smoothly. Their histories are written in stone and appear to include figures from the past. The birth of a deity on the same date multiple times in the distant past could be the basis for the narratives of the lives of kings. The descriptions of the exact phase of the moon are included in many stories.
Stuart believes that Maya history and Maya astronomy are the same thing.
Between the Xultn workshop and the last centuries before Spanish conquest there was a period of Maya civilization. The books were painted in Yucatn. Long Count dates in the Venus table and a table of solar eclipses show how the Sun, Moon, and planets appeared in the sky hundreds of years ago.
The Venus table had a larger cultural purpose after the Maya script was deciphered. The table recounts battles between Venus and the Sun in a fusion of creation stories from the Maya and what is now central Mexico.
There are illustrations depicting meetings between Venus in deity form and other godlike figures in the table. Today's daykeepers can anticipate what dates in the 260-day calendar will fall with this table.
An additional set of correction factors, provided on another page, helps correct for how the cycle slips by a few days per century.
The Venus table in the Codex describes the planet's motions in the night sky.
A Maya scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara claims in a book that the astronomer who made the correction for the Venus predictions was a woman. In a mural, a figure with breasts walks in a huge procession.
The Maya glyph system and many codices were destroyed by colonizers after the Spanish arrived in the early 16th century. 7 million people still speak at least one of the 30 Maya-descended languages.
Folklore and stories with agricultural or ecological import have been assembled over a lifetime of systematic observation. The 260-day calendar and elements of the solar calendar were discovered by anthropologists when they visited Maya communities in the 20th century. Jarita Holbrook is an academic at the University of Edinburgh who has studied Indigenous star knowledge in Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas. "They're incorrect."
At the other end of the Maya world in Mexico's Yucatn Peninsula, Maya elder Mara vila Vera is moving with a cane. With city lights far away, the late evening sky has turned dark. She tells a story about three stars in a line as she looks up at the Greek constellation.
Many Maya and their partners believe that knowledge is tied to places and relationships. One of the best ways to understand past astronomy is to visit the places where they looked at the sky.
At Uxmal, Isabel is walking by vila Vera. She became interested in Maya culture after working in science education. She befriended local archaeologists, Indigenous knowledge holders like the Zunil daykeepers, and vila Vera, whom she met at an astronomy presentation to a Yucatec community.
Under a new set of methods called cultural astronomy, this loose network gathered for a trip through Guatemala and Honduras to work together.
Toms Barrientos, an archaeologist who hosted part of the meeting, said that they felt like they were contributing to a new concept instead of being behind what was happening in other areas of the world.
Preserving living star lore and oral traditions is a central task for cultural astronomy. This can involve assembling puzzle pieces Tepeu Poz Salanic started looking for star stories in the Guatemalan highlands after he met Hawkins. He often visits nearby towns to play a revived version of the ancient Maya ball game and asks the locals if they know anything about the stars.
The Paris Codex contains a depiction of ancient Maya star stories. There are a deer and a scorpion in the constellation, but the illustrations in the codex don't match with the stars.
The locals in Santa Luca Utatln said there was a deer in the night sky, but they didn't know where it was. He knew that the stars in the constellation Scorpio are thought of as scorpions. It's not known whether stories from two continents converge or get mixed together after colonization. The name of the scorpion is pa raqan kej, which means "under the deer's leg," according to the research notes. The deer constellation from the Paris Codex is thought to be above the scorpion's tail.
vila Vera remembers using telescopes. There was a bundle of stars that were washed away in the light of the rising Sun when she was a child. He told her that the cluster began to appear as the harvest approached. A clear atmosphere, sunny skies, and a good crop are what it means if the stars in the cluster look different. In 2000, a team of scientists argued in Nature that a blurry view of the early dawn Pleiades can be used to predict El Nio conditions and less rain months later.
The stars are shining through a thin mist at 4:30 a.m. in Uxmal and the Moon is a few days removed from full. The Governor's Palace is a massive complex that includes steep steps. There are bats in the structure. Venus hangs in the sky straight ahead over an expanse of jungle, flanked closely by Mars and Saturn.
A new ruler in Uxmal built up this complex. There are five sculptures of Chac, a Maya rain deity with a trunklike nose, blanketing the structure. The faade has more than 350 glyph signifying "Venus" or "star" The director of Uxmal's National Institute of Anthropology and History excavated the last two of the sculptures, which were engraved with the number "8" above their eyes.
This structure screams its affiliation with the planet because it takes eight years for Venus to go through five cycles. Hundreds of thousands of people visit Uxmal every year. Archaeoastronomers and Maya are still trying to understand the meaning of this building. On the day the planet hits the southernmost point in the sky, anyone standing in the main door of the Governor's Palace would see a pyramid almost in line with Venus. Aveni thinks the structures were in the right place to create this sightline.
Huchim Herrara is partial to the idea that the viewer is meant to stand on a pyramid and look west towards the building as Venus rises over it. The line from the Governor's Palace main door to the jungle led to the discovery of the pyramid. They found a huge mound known as Cehtzuc, which is still un mapped, after a long day.
If you stood on that mound, Venus would appear over the Governor's Palace in early May, when the rainy period begins in Yucatn. Huchim Herrara says venerating water is the most motivating thing.
vila Vera is stirred by Uxmal. She remembered sitting by the train tracks under the shade of a tree and listening to her grandmother tell stories about stars and ancient cities when she was a child.
Uxmal was not a good place to visit according to her grandmother. They were ancestral homes to caretakers who needed permission to use them. vila Vera wanted to see a place at the center of her grandmothers stories. They went to Uxmal together.
She went from getting oral tradition to passing it on. The need to keep passing knowledge down to her own children was what vila Vera's grandmother emphasized most by the train tracks.
Her grandmother told her that the pak was a puksik'al. You have to plant the seeds in your heart.
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