Journal for the History of Astronomy, Vol. ix (1978), pp.

105-116 A RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CHRONOLOGY OF MESOAMERICAN CALENDRICAL SYSTEMS VINCENT H. MALMSTRM, Dartmouth College Any attempt to reconstruct the calendrical systems of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is obliged to reconcile a number of disparate hypotheses. Among these are the following: (1) Most authorities are agreed that the earliest means of measuring time in Mesoamerica was a 260-day count which was religious in nature. Had the sacred 260-day cycle not predated the discovery of the 365-day year, it seems highly unlikely that it would ever have come into existence. (2) Sometime after the initiation of the sacred almanac - probably when it became clear that the 260-day cycle was of little use to an agricultural society - it was recognized that the year had 365 days. At that time it is reasonable to assume that a second, secular count was begun to measure the solar year. (3) In the course of time, regularly recurring astronomical events such as the solstices or transits of the vertical Sun were seen to get out of phase with the secular calendar, i.e. to slip forward, due to the fact that the 365-day count was about one-quarter day shorter than the true solar year (365.2422 days). (4) To overcome the uncertainties and ambiguities of having two calendars running concurrently, neither of which accurately corresponded to reality, the decision was made to mesh the two counts in such a way that they would record each passing day since 'the beginning of time'. This seems to have been the purpose of the elaborately structured Long Count system, whose beginning date (according to the Goodman-Martnez-Thompson correlation) was fixed at 13 August 3114 B.C. - a date known to the Mayas as 4 Ahau 8 Cumku. (5) The earliest inscriptions using the Long Count which have been discovered to date are descriptive of events in the first centuries before and after Christ - a period known as Baktun 7 to the Maya. However, because these inscriptions considerably pre-date the rise of the Maya and were found well outside their core area, it is generally accepted that the Long Count must have been an invention of the Olmecs. Of the hypotheses cited above, the most concrete is that having to do with the date established as 'the beginning of time'. Although the year is clearly fictitious, the month and day probably are not, for 13 August marks the southward transit of the vertical Sun just south of the 15th parallel of north latitudean astronomical 'fixpoint' which could scarcely have gone unnoticed even by the most primitive of peoples. This parallel marks the location of both the Pre-Classic site of Izapa, on the Pacific coastal lowland of Mexico, and of Copdn, the Classic centre of astronomical studies under the Maya, in the mountains of western Honduras. The choice of 4 Ahau 8 Cumku as the day 'time began' is interesting for several reasons. First, Ahau is the day- name of the 20th and last day of every Mayan 'week', whereas Cumku is the name of the 18th and last formal month of the Mayan year

(Cumku is followed by a period of five unlucky days known as Uayeb.) Clearly, for time to have begun on a day numbered 4 which was the last of a 20-day 'week' and fell near the middle of the last 20-day month in the year suggests that 4 Ahau 8 Cumku was simply an extrapolation into the distant past of a time-reckoning system which had been set in motion long after the fictitious date on which it was supposedly started. Furthermore, it is an interesting date because if a 260-day cycle had been permutated against a 365-day cycle with both of them starting together on the first day of each cycle, such a combination would never have occurred. This is because 4 Ahau initially would fall on the 160th day of the 260-day cycle and would recur thereafter every 260 days, but, because of the length of the solar year, it could do so only on days that were multiples of five. (Because the Maya numbered the days of their month from 0 to 19 rather than from I to 20, this would have meant that the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twentieth days of the month were 4, 9, 14, and 19, respectively.) The only way in which the two cycles could ever have arrived at such a date as 4 Ahau 8 Cumku is if they had each been started independently at different times. This certainly would have been the case had the sacred 260-day cycle been set in motion at the southward transit of the vertical Sun and the 365-day cycle had been initiated at the summer solstice, for example. In an earlier article, (1) the author has argued that the 260-day sacred count most probably originated at Izapa on the Pacific coastal plain of Mexico as a measure of the interval between zenithal Sun positions. This is not the only hypothesis that has been advanced to explain this unique Mesoamerican calendar nor was it the first time that an astronomical basis was sought for its explanation. At least two other hypotheses are discussed by Thompson in his volume entitled Maya hieroglyphic writing (2) the first of which suggests that the 260-day interval is an approximation of the human gestation period, while the second argues that it is derived from a permutation of the numbers 13 and 20, both of which were important in Mesoamerican thought. An astronomical origin for the sacred count was postulated as early as 1928 by Nuttall, who suggested (3) that the Mayan city of Copn must have been the birthplace of the calendar. Apenes, writing in the 1930s, came to the same conclusion (4) while Merrill, writing in 1945, (5) felt that the argument in favour of Copn was further strengthened by the correspondence between the starting date of the Long Count as determined by the Goodman-Martnez-Thompson correlation and the southward transit of the vertical Sun at that location, i.e. 13 August. Although the present author independently arrived at the same conclusions regarding the astronomical origins of the calendar and the latitude at which it could have been devised, he was forced to reject Copn as its birthplace for two reasons - one historical and the other geographical. His source for the former objection is Morley, who implies (6) that Copn was founded well after the sacred count had been devised. His second objection stems from an observation made in 1908 by a German naturalist named Gadow (7), the validity of which would almost certainly rule out any such highland site as Copn, which lies at some 600 metres elevation. Gadow argued that, because of the day-names of the sacred count commemorate lowland tropical animals such as the alligator, monkey, and iguana, the calendar must have been devised in a region where such creatures were present. Therefore, the present author reasoned that only an ancient ceremonial centre which was situated in the lowlands just south of the l5th parallel of latitude would meet all the necessary conditions, and the sole such site which exists in Mesoamerica, is Izapa, on the Pacific coastal plain of Mexico immediately adjacent to the border of Guatemala.

If, indeed, the sacred 260-day calendar had originated at Izapa as a measure of the interval between vertical Sun positions as the author has postulated, then how did the priests of Izapa determine the length of the solar year? Two methods immediately suggest themselves: one was to count the number of days between two vertical transits of the southward-moving Sun, and the other was to note the position which the Sun occupied at the solstice and to count the number of days until it reached that position again. Of the two methods, both the internal evidence of the calendar (i.e. the different initial starting points for the sacred and secular counts) and field studies at Izapa suggest that the latter was indeed the technique they employed. Measurements made by the author from the main pyramid at Izapa reveal that the Volcano Tajumulco - the highest mountain in Central America - stands at an azimuth of 65, which is precisely the azimuth of the rising Sun at the summer solstice. Thus, at Izapa it was possible to accurately calibrate the length of both the sacred and secular calendars, in the latter instance by using the most impressive topographical 'fix-point' in all of Central America. If the author is correct in his contention that it was the southward transit of the vertical Sun which marked the beginning of the (Olmec?) New Year (13 August), when was the decision made to build this date into their equation for 'the beginning of time'? Again, a clue may be found in the internal structure of the calendars themselves. In the vigesimal numeric system which these early Mesoarnericans employed, an Ahau day always marked the end of a 20- day month (uinal), a 360-day year (tun), a 7200-day katun, and a 144,000-day baktun. Assuming that the pattern later observed by the Maya accurately reflected an earlier custom practised by the Olmec (and in this regard, societies tend to be extremely conservative), it was the katun endings which comprised the major chronological milestones of their civilization. Thus, the question to which we must address ourselves is how many times since 3114 B.C. did a katun end on 8 Cumku? The author determined that, apart from the day that 'time began', there have been only two other occasions on which a katun ending fell on 8 Cumku. The first of these was in the year 1674 B.C. when the day 1 Ahau fell in that position, and the second occurrence was in 235 B.C. when 11 Ahau fell on that date. In other words, there was an interval of more than 1439 years between each time a katun ended on 8 Cumku, the most recent event being in A.D. 1204. Thus, in terms of the internal logic behind the Long Count, we are left with only two dates when it could have come into being. Of these, the earlier (1674 B.C.) must be rejected as being far too early, in the context of what else is known about Mesoamerican civilization. However, the second date (235 B.C.) falls in the first half of Baktun 7, scarcely two centuries before the oldest recorded inscriptions yet uncovered. It therefore seems likely that some priest, most probably at Izapa, decided that in the interests of bringing order out of chaos, he must establish once and for all the date when 'time began', so that an accurate count of the days could be maintained from that time forward. The date on which this memorable event seems to have taken place was 13 September 235 B.C. - a day when the sacred almanac had reached a position called 11 Ahau and the secular calendar recorded a day of 8 Cumku. By extrapolating backwards for what he considered a "reasonable" length of time - in this case, for 7 baktuns and 6 katuns or 1,051,200 days - the priest arrived at the date of 4 Ahau (the final numeral of each successive baktun being reduced by 1 : 11 - 7 = 4). Does the geographic distribution of baktun 7 stelae tend to confirm or deny this hypothesis of a Pacific coastal plain origin for the major components of the Mesoamerican calendrical system? Although no dated inscriptions have been discovered at Izapa, at least two baktun 7 inscriptions have been found at the nearby Abaj Takalik and El Bal sites on the Pacific coastal plain of Guatemala. However, the oldest Long Count inscription yet identified comes from Chiapa de Corzo, in the valley of the Grijalva river, some 220 kilometres to the northwest of Izapa. This is a stela whose date is equated to 36 B.C. The second oldest, dating from 31 B.C., was found at

Tres Zapotes in the Veracruz coastal plain, a further 325 kilometres to the northwest. Despite the distance of these two earliest inscriptions from Izapa, it is perhaps significant that both of the sites at which they were found are located on strategic corridors of movement - Chiapa de Corzo in the interior valley of a great river which rises in the vicinity of Tajumulco and affords the easiest penetration of the regions beyond the coastal mountain range (the Sierra Madre), and Tres Zapotes which lies near the flanks of the Tuxtla mountains where the Tehuantepec Gap opens northwestwards into the coastal plain of Veracruz. (It should be noted that Caso and others have argued (8) that the Mesoamerican calendars and the hieroglyphs used to record them were first employed at Monte Albn in the valley of Oaxaca, possibly as early as the sixth century B.C. However, neither these inscriptions nor those found at Tonal on the Pacific coastal plain of Mexico employ the Long Count system, a finding which is entirely consistent with the idea that the latter was devised considerably later than the calendars themselves.) If the date of origin of the Long Count as postulated here is correct (and other researchers including Teeple in 1930 have arrived at the same result (9)), then it is theoretically possible to fix the dates of initiation of both the secular and sacred cycles as well. For example, if the counting of the number of days in the solar year began with the summer solstice as the author has suggested above (the beginning day being 0 Pop in Mayan terminology), then the southward transit of the vertical Sun at Izapa would have taken place. 53 days later, or on 13 Zip in the initial cycle. For the secular calendar to have advanced from this position to 8 Cumku would have entailed a total gain of 295 days over the solar year, pushing the time of origin of the 365-day count back to the period between 1320 and 1323 B.C. This four-year period marked the only time that the day 0 Pop coincided with the summer solstice, so if the author's hypothesis is correct, it appears that the origin of the 365-day 'Vague Year' can be traced to the first quarter of the fourteenth century before Christ. Moreover, since the sacred 260-day count was already running, the summer solstice during this four year period fell on the days 8 Manik, 7 Ik, 6 Caban, and 5 Eb, respectively. Using any or all of these days as a starting point, it was determined when the first day of the sacred almanac (a day called I Imix) would have fallen on 13 August to mark the southward transit of the vertical Sun. The first time such a correspondence resulted was in the year 1358 B.C. Thus, from the internal structure of the calendars themselves, the author concludes that both the sacred and secular counts could have originated within a 35-year period of each other and that they both probably arose out of the recognition of astronomical events which could be easily and repeatedly observed at Izapa. But, is there any other evidence which might support such a time and place of calendrical origin in Mesoamerica? The answer is affirmative, for radiocarbon dates from the interior of Mound 30a at Izapa, which Susanna Ekholm. has identified as "the largest structure of its kind so far described for that time level in Mesoamerica", (10) reveal that this site was not only occupied by at least 1500 B.C. but that its occupants were already engaged in the layout and construction of fairly elaborate edifices. Significantly, the oldest radio-carbon dates from ceremonial centres in the so- called "Metropolitan area" of the Olmec in the Gulf coastal plain of Mexico go back to ca 1400 B.C. in the case of San Lorenzo and ca 1200 B.C. at La Venta. (It should be pointed out that when these radio-carbon dates are revised to account for the change in half-life and for bristle-cone pine tree-ring dating, they can be pushed back ca 200 years earlier"; nevertheless, the relationships between them obviously remain the same.) Thus, if the hypothesis of calendrical origins presented here is accurate, then the ideas of the sacred and secular counts would appear to

have diffused across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec from Izapa into the "Metropolitan area" of the Olmec, rather than the other way around. Another clue, admittedly circumstantial, may have been provided by the excavations of Lowe and his associates at Altamira and adjacent sites some 35 kilometres west of Izapa. In the earliest horizon, termed by Lowe the Barra phase, he found no manos or metates for grinding corn whatsoever, though "small, nondescript pieces of obsidian were particularly abundant". The latter, he postulates, were set into boards to make graters on which manioc was shredded. However, "sometime following 1400 B.C.", Lowe noted an abrupt disappearance of the obsidian chips as the cultivation of maize became the dominant economic livelihood of the peoples of the Pacific coastal plain." From the point of view of calendrical origins, the timing of this apparent shift from manioc to maize cultivation is especially interesting because it coincides so closely with the author's projections outlined above. As a result, one is tempted to speculate that the very reason calendrical experimentation may have begun in the fourteenth century B.C. in the coastal plain around Izapa was to enable the early maize farmer to better understand the sequence of the seasons on which his livelihood was so dependent. It is the author's belief that yet another clue to the origins and diffusion of calendrical knowledge in Mesoamerica may be traced to Izapa. It was suggested above that the calibration of the solar year was first carried out there by noting the interval between consecutive sunrises over the highest mountain in Central America. It therefore occurred to the author that at any ceremonial centre subsequently constructed, the priests may have dictated that a similar pattern of orientation be followed in order to permit them to fix the solstices. To test his hypothesis, he and his associates mapped the orientation of nearly fifty Mesoamerican ceremonial centres and analyzed a score of others with the assistance of large-scale maps. The geographic pattern of solsticially-oriented sites which emerged was especially interesting because it revealed two main prongs of calendrical diffusion: a minor one which led south and east along the Guatemalan highlands as far as Kaminaljuy, the largest and most important 'Olmecoid' ceremonial centre in Guatemala, and a major one which led north and westward through the Tehuantepec gap, into the "Metropolitan area" of the Olmec in the Gulf coastal plain of Mexico, and thence into the highlands of the Mexican plateau as far as Cholula and Teotihuacn, the largest urban centre in pre-Columbian America. From the northern prong a secondary 'arm' appears to have bent eastward to include the two oldest Classic Maya sites at Uaxactn and Tikal, though amongst the latter people the orientation of major ceremonial centres was not only precluded by a lack of suitable topographic features but also supplanted by alignments built into the structures themselves, as for example, the Caracol "observatory" at Chichen Itza. Table 1 summarizes the major Mesoamerican sites which would appear to have been located in terms of solsticial orientation (for which see also Figures 1 and 2). It is the author's contention that, if, indeed, such a practice was followed in the siting of major ceremonial centres, it is far more likely to have been initiated at Izapa where the physical presence of Tajumulco and its relationship to the solsticial position of the Sun were so "obvious" than in places such as San Lorenzo or La Venta where the highest topographic features were so much farther away. Of course, the actual location of any ceremonial centre would of necessity have represented a compromise between a given astronomical alignment and a specific set of site factors. Let us consider, for example, the two oldest known Olmec ceremonial centres, San Lorenzo and La Venta, both of which are located in the dense rainforests of the Gulf coastal plain of eastern Mexico. From San Lorenzo, the highest mountain which is visible is Zempoaltepec, over which the Sun sets at the winter solstice. Naturally, any place that was situated along the same azimuth would have been solsticially oriented to Zempoaltepec as well, so why was San Lorenzo erected

TABLE I.Mesoamerican ceremonial centres having a possible solsticial orientation (compiled from field surveys and/or large-scale maps (1:250,000 or greater)). Solsticial orientation Feature towards which oriented

Region

Site

Elevation metres

Distance km

Pacific coastal plain (Chiapas, Guatemala) Izapa Summer-sunrise El Jobo Summer-sunrise Coatepeque Summer-sunrise Abaj Takalik Summer-sunrise Tiquisate Summer-sunrise Santa Lucia Cotzumalguapa Summer-sunrise La. Democracia Summer-sunrise Kaminaijuyil Winter-sunset Tonal Summer-sunrise Gulf coastal plain (Veracruz) San Lorenzo Winter-sunset La Venta Surnmer-sunset Tres Zapotes Summer-sunrise Laguna de los Cerros Summer-sunrise El Mesn Winter-sunrise Cerro de la Piedra Winter-sunrise Cerro de Ias Mesas Winter-sunrise Nopiloa Rernojadas Cempoala Quauhtochco Mexican plateau Cholula Tlatilco Tlapacoya Gualupita Cuicuilco Tlaxcala Texcoco Peten (N. Guatemala) Uaxactun Tikal Summer-sunset Winter-sunrise Winter-sunrise Summer-sunrise Summer-sunrise Winter-sunrise Winter-sunset Winter-sunrise Winter-sunrise Ixtaccihuatl Ixtaccihuatl Ixtaccihuatl Ixtaccihuatl C. de la Estrella C. la Malinche Nevado de Toluca Baldy Beacon Victoria Peak 5286 5286 5286 5286 2460 4461 4558 1020 1122 29 68 38 69 11 24 102 100 115 Summer-sunset Surnmer-sunset Winter-sunset Winter-sunset Zempoaltepec V. San Martin V. San Martin C. San Martin C. San Martin C. del Vigia C. del Vigia Citlaltepec Cofre de Perote Citlaltepec Citlaltepec 3350 1550 1550 1350 1350 800 800 5700 4282 5700 5700 148 133 27 45 60 35 77 120 91 102 35 V. Tajumulco V. Lacandn C, Siete Orejas V. Zunil V. Acatenango V. Agua V. Pacaya V. Fuego Tres Picos 4220 2747 3367 3542 3976 3760 2552 3763 2805 32 59 33 36 58 34 41 39 16

precisely where it was? The answer seems to lie in the fact that it was built by a water-oriented people who used the Rio Coatzacoalcos and its tributaries to transport the massive stone heads

and other stone building materials from seaside quarries in the Tuxtla mountains to the north: its site is the closest place accessible to waterborne traffic that bears the proper solsticial relationship to Zempoaltepec. Even so, it would appear that the entire site occupies a man-made plateau whose "long, flat-topped ridges are obviously planned, but for what purpose we cannot even guess. (13) Might it not have been to afford a better view of the sacred mountain against which Olmec priests calibrated their calendar? The location of La Venta, which Coe calls a "sanctuary in the swamps", (14) is similarly inexplicable unless its site and situation factors are combined. Its solsticial orientation would seem to be toward the sunset position at the summer solstice over Volcn San Martn, the highest peak in the Tuxtlas, whereas its site is a river terrace on the right-bank of the Rio Tonal. Thus, like San Lorenzo, it combines the proper solsticial. orientation with access to waterborne building materials from the Tuxtlas to the northwest. Here, too, massive human effort was involved in erecting a 30-metre clay pyramid, part of whose purpose may have been to improve the visibility of Volcn San Martn some 133 kilometres away. On the Mexican plateau, two of the most important ceremonial centres which have suggestive astronomical orientations are Cholula and Teotihuacn. The former lies in the broad, open, semi-arid Basin of Puebla where neither topography nor drainage imposed any constraints on the choice of site. However, once the principle of solsticial orientation is appreciated, it is readily understood why the Pyramid of Tepanapa, the largest man-made edifice in pre-Columbian America, was constructed where it was, for it is aligned to the setting Sun over the highest peak of Ixtaccihuatl, i.e., the 'breasts' of the "White Lady", on the summer solstice. Teotihuacn, in the Valley of Mexico, was the largest pre-Columbian city in the New World, and has long been known for its elaborate biaxial grid-plan which is oriented 15.5 clockwise of the cardinal points (i.e., the so-called "Street of the Dead" is aligned 15.5 east of north, while its intersecting axis is aligned 15.5 north of west). In the case of Teotihuacn, the site factor is readily apparent; the city lay on the alluvial fan of the largest stream emptying into the largest lake basin in central Mexico. The city likewise occupied a strategic pass-route leading eastward across the mountains from the Basin of Mexico. Coincidentally, Teotihuacn was also situated in line with the sunrise over Citlltepec, Mexico's highest mountain, at the winter solstice. However, the latter phenomenon is not visible to an observer even on top of the great Pyramid of the Sun because it is obscured by a low ridge of hills some 15 kilometres to the southeast. Clearly, if solsticial orientation was a factor in the location of the New World's greatest urban centre, it could only have been so if some sort of 'relay station' had been operative on the intervening ridge. Such a possibility cannot be ruled out, inasmuch as calendrical markers have already been found on hills 3 km to the west and 7 km to the north of the city. (15) An astronomical explanation has been sought for Teotihuacn's grid-plan for many years without a convincing correlation having been established. The city's commanding structure, the Pyramid of the Sun, is precisely oriented to the Street of the Dead so that its western face is oriented to an azimuth of 285.5. However, sunset on the day the Sun passes directly overhead occurs at an azimuth of 290.8, so such an explanation is clearly inadequate. (16) Aveni argues that the Pleiades are "worth considering" as a possible astronomical motive for the city's alignment, for about A.D. 150 they set at an azimuth of 284.6. However, he undercuts much of the force of his argument by noting that they would have been "invisible well before they reached the horizon of Teotihuacn" and that "the precessional motion of the Pleiades is so rapid that a mistake of 100 years in the dating of the baseline is equivalent to a shift of 1 in the azimuth of the setting point"." Despite these apparent inconsistencies, he continues to maintain that "they

[the Pleiades] must remain the prime candidate for an astronomical motivation in the orientation of Teotihuacn". (18) Yet must they, for a people whose lives were dominated by the sacred 260-day calendar may have found that the day that 'time began' was a far more meaningful date to celebrate. Thus on 13 August, the Sun sets at an azimuth of 285.7 at Teotihuacn, or ca 0.20 from the alignment of the Pyramid of the Sun - a fact which may explain why other ceremonial centres on the Mexican plateau adopted the same orientation as Teotihuacn, despite the fact that they were constructed hundreds of years later. If so, this would lay to rest "the non-functional imitation" hypothesis of Aveni, who suggests that later sites such as Tenayuca, Tepozteco, and Tula were simply copied by their builders from the plan of Teotihuacn, since the Pleiades were already setting from 7 to 9 away from where they were at the time of the construction of the great metropolis. (19) That 13 August would have been a simple day for any priest to have identified stems from the fact that it comes exactly 52 days after the summer solstice! The two oldest and largest Mayan ceremonial centres, Uaxactn and Tikal, are also among those demonstrating a suggestive astronomical orientation. Detailed measurements supplied by the Department of Technical Services of the Defense Mapping Agency in Washington, D.C., reveal that winter solstice sunrise occurs less than 0.9 from the top of Baldy Beacon, as seen from Uaxactn, and ca 1.4 away from the top of Victoria Peak, as seen from Tikal .(20) In the first instance, the line-of-sight distance is 100.2 km, and in the latter, 115.3 km. It is significant that both Uaxactn and Tikal, although located only 19 km apart, are sited near the crest of the water-divide between the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, no doubt for reasons of enhanced visibility. In this karstic limestone region, Hardoy points out that "In all cases high zones, but not necessarily the highest, were the preferred building sites". (21) The distinction between 'high' and 'highest' is probably explained by the fact that the highest hill in the area was not necessarily the one that afforded the proper azimuth for viewing the solstice, so that the builders of Uaxactn and Tikal compromised in the choice of somewhat lower features that met their required solar alignments. However, in ceremonial centres built later and in the north of Yucatn where there are no topographic features toward which astronomical alignments can be made, sight-lines appear to have been built into the structures themselves. (22) Even so, the possible significance of some of the orientations seem to have eluded him, for Aveni states that "No obvious astronomical correlations have been found which pertain to the remaining Caracol window alignments [at Chichen Itz ]". Nevertheless, the mid-line of Window 1 is oriented to an azimuth of 285.6, which he notes corresponds to the sunset positions of 1 May and 14 August (?). Similarly, at Uxmal, there are numerous alignments to the same azimuth, including the Pyramid of the Magician, the site's most dominating structure. From the foregoing discussion, the following chronology of calendrical. development in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica suggests itself: (1) The origin of the sacred 260-day almanac dates back to the southward transit of the vertical Sun at Izapa, most probably in the year 1358 B.C. (2) At the time of the summer solstice in the period 1323-1320 B.C., the secular count of 365 days appears to have been set in motion at Izapa - the interval being marked by consecutive sunrises over Tajumulco, the highest mountain in Central America.

(3) The use of commanding topographic features to calibrate the length of the solar year seems to have spread with the calendrical systems throughout Mesoamerica, helping to fix the locations of many of the earliest major ceremonial centres, including such places as San Lorenzo, La Venta, Cholula, KaminaIjuy, Uaxactn, and Tikal. (4) By 235 B.C., perhaps growing out of the realization that neither of their calendars was in phase with observable and repeated astronomical phenomena such as the solstices or vertical transits of the Sun, priests, most probably at Izapa, resolved to mesh the two counts and establish a fixed point for the 'beginning of time', against which all subsequent dates would be reckoned. The creation of the so-called Long Count fixed the day 4 Ahau 8 Cumku as the point of origin, corresponding to 13 August 3114 B.C. in the Gregorian calendar. There is strong circumstantial evidence that many of the ceremonial centres of the Mexican plateau, including Teotihuacn, were oriented toward the sunset position on 13 August, and that many of the later Mayan ceremonial centres in the Yucatdn incorporated such an orientation into their structures as well. REFERENCES 1. Vincent H. Malmstrm, "Origin of the Mesoamerican 260-day Calendar", Science, clxxxi (1973),759-60. 2. J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya hieroglyphic writing: An introduction (Norman, Oklahoma, 1960),98. 3. Zelia Nuttall, "Nouvelles lumieres sur les civilisations americaines et le systeme du calendrier", Proceedings of the Twentysecond International Congress of Americanists (Rome, 1928), 119-48, p. 119. 4. Ola Apenes, "Possible Derivation of the 260 Day Period of the Maya Calendar", Ethos (Stockholm), i (1936), 5-8. 5. R. H. Merrill, "Maya Sun Calendar Dictum Disproved", American antiquity, x (1945), 307-11. 6. Sylvanus G. Morley, The ancient Maya (Stanford, California, 1946), 59. 7. H. F. Gadow, Travels through Southern Mexico (New York, 1908). 8. Alfonso Caso, Los Calendarios Prehispanicos (Mexico [City], 1967), 77. 9. Thompson, Maya hieroglyphic writing, 152. 10. Susanna M. Ekholm, "Mound 30a and the Early Preclassic Ceramic Sequence of Izapa, Chiapas, Mexico", Number 25, Papers of the New World Archaeological Foundation (Provo, Utah, 1969), 1. 11. John L. Sorenson, "A Mesoamerican Chronology: April 1977" (mimeographed: Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, 1977), Fig. 1.

12. Gareth W. Lowe, "The Early Preclassic Barra Phase of Altamira, Chiapas: A Review with New Data", Number 38, Papers of the New World Archaeological Foundation (Provo, Utah, 1975), 13-14. 13. Michael D. Coe, America's first civilization (New York, 1968), 79. 14. Ibid., 53. 15. Anthony F. Aveni (ed.), Archaeoastronomy in Pre-Columbian America (Austin, Texas, 1975),4-5. 16. It is, nonetheless, the explanation cited in many sources. See, for example, Doris Heyden and Paul Gendrop, Pre- Columbian architecture of Mesoamerica (New York, 1975), 39. 17. Aveni, op. cit. (ref. 15), 169. 18. Anthony F. Avent (ed), Native American astronomy (Ausiln, Texas, 1977), 3. 19. Aveni, op. cit. (ref. 15),170-1. 20. Personal communication. 21. Jorge Hardoy, Urban planning in Pre-Columbian America (New York, 1968), 27. 22. Aveni, op. cit. (ref. 15), 178-89

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