1036 3 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6597 science.org SCIENCE

PHOTO: SERGIO MONTÚFAR/TIKAL NATIONAL PARK/ESTRELLAS ANCESTRALES “ASTRONOMY IN THE MAYA WORLDVIEW”

FEATURES

A

s the Sun climbs over a hillside

ceremony, Ixquik Poz Salanic

invokes a day in the sacred cal-

endar: T’zi’, a day for seeking

justice. Before she passes the mi-

crophone to the next speaker, she

counts to 13 in K’iche’, an Indig-

enous Maya language with more

than 1 million present-day speak-

ers in Guatemala’s central highlands. A few

dozen onlookers nod along, from grand-

mothers in traditional dresses to visiting

schoolchildren shifting politely in their

seats. Then the crowd joins a counter-

clockwise procession around a fire at the

mouth of a cave, shuffle dancing to the

beat of three men playing marimba while

they toss offerings of candles, copal, and

incense to the wind-licked flames.

Poz Salanic, a lawyer, serves as a day-

keeper for her community, which means

she keeps track of a 260-day cycle—20 days

counted 13 times—that informs Maya rit-

ual life. In April, archaeologists announced

they had deciphered a 2300-year-old in-

scription bearing a date in this same calen-

dar format, proving it was in use millennia

ago by the historic Maya, who lived across

southeastern Mexico and Central America.

In small villages like this one, the Maya

calendar kept ticking through conquest

and centuries of persecution.

As recently as the 1990s, “Everything we

did today would have been called witchcraft,”

says fellow daykeeper Roberto Poz Pérez,

Poz Salanic’s father, after the day count

concludes and everyone has enjoyed a

lunch of tamales.

The 260-day calendar is a still-spinning

engine within what was once a much larger

machine of Maya knowledge: a vast corpus

of written, quantitative Indigenous science

that broke down the natural world and hu-

man existence into interlocking, gearlike cy-

cles of days. In its service, Maya astronomers

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-minute.

FEATURES

By Joshua Sokol, in Zunil, Guatemala

THE STARGAZERS

The historic Maya oriented their lives by the heavens. Today, their descendants

and Western scholars team up to understand their sophisticated astronomy