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Anna Karamazina

26.11.2022 15:00

Lasers show the locations of the Americas' earliest known star calendars

A new study indicates that Olmec and Maya people living along Mexico's Gulf Coast as early as 3,100 years ago created star-aligned ritual centers to chronicle significant days of their 260-day calendar.

The earliest recorded evidence of this calendar dates to about 300 and 200 B.C., and was found on painted plaster mural pieces from a Maya site in Guatemala (SN: 4/13/22). Researchers have long assumed that Gulf Coast Olmec civilizations devised a 260-day calendar hundreds of years ago.

According to archaeologist Ivan Šprajc and colleagues, an aerial laser-mapping method known as light detection and ranging, or lidar, has revealed the astronomical orientations of 415 ceremonial complexes spanning from around 1100 B.C. to A.D. 250. The researchers wrote in Science Advances on January 6 that most ceremonial sites were aligned on an east-to-west axis, correlating to sunrises or other astronomical occurrences on certain days of a 260-day year.

The discovery relates to the oldest indication of a structured calendar system in the Americas that integrated celestial knowledge with terrestrial buildings. This technique used celestial events to determine major dates throughout a 260-day period.

The 260-day cycle emerged in Mesoamerica's oldest known monumental complexes and was used for arranging seasonal, subsistence-related rites, Šprajc of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts' Research Center in Ljubljana explains.

Some of the earliest lidar-identified ceremonial complexes certainly belong to the Olmec culture, while others are difficult to categorize, according to archaeologist Stephen Houston of Brown University in Providence, R.I., who did not take part in the current study.

The Olmec civilization existed between 3,500 and 2,400 years ago. There are no apparent links between the Olmec and subsequent Maya cultures, which are most known for Classic-era cities and kingdoms that thrived between around 1,750 and 1,100 years ago. However, the 260-day calendar is also mentioned in Classic Maya inscriptions and texts.

The 260-day calendar may have been used by mobile tribes in Mesoamerica, an ancient cultural area that stretched from central Mexico to Central America, long before it became popular among Classic Maya monarchs, according to Šprajc and colleagues. They note that the same calendar may have marked days of key agricultural activity or ceremonies when maize production spread in Mesoamerica circa 3,000 years ago. Some Maya villages continue to utilize a 260-day calendar to plan maize planting and agricultural rites.

Previous lidar data suggested that ceremonial complexes built on a common architecture were developed around 3,400 years ago at various Olmec and Maya sites along Mexico's Gulf Coast (SN: 10/25/21). The calendrical importance of ceremonial center alignments has just recently become clear.

The new analysis found that the most prevalent architectural alignment corresponds to the position of sunrises on February 11 and October 29 when facilities were in operation, separated by 260 days. These constructions were oriented eastward, toward the spot on the horizon where the sun was rising on those two days.

Another common orientation corresponded to sunrises spaced by 130 days, or half of the whole 260-day count.

In the 260-day year, a small number of ritual complexes were synchronized with solstices (the longest and shortest days of the year), quarter days (the midpoint of each half of the year), or lunar cycles. Other observatories monitored the movement of Venus, a star connected with the rain and maize production.

Sunrises and sunsets were generally spaced by multiples of 13 or 20 days at ceremonial places. Apart from expressing the basic mathematical units of a 260-day year, the numbers 13 and 20 have long been connected with many gods and sacred conceptions among the Maya and other Mesoamerican communities, according to Šprajc.

Future studies at lidar-detected ceremonial complexes will be able to determine if ancient cultures formally committed certain facilities to specific days in the 260-day year, according to Houston.

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