SCIENCE science.org 3 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6597 1037
NEWSIn the 19th century, Western science belat-
edly began to comprehend the sophistication
of Maya knowledge, recognizing that a table
of dates in a rare, surviving Maya text tracked
the movements of Venus in the 260-day cal-
endar. That discovery—or rediscovery—set
off a still-ongoing wave of research into Maya
astronomy. Researchers scoured archaeo-
logical sites and sifted through Mayan script
looking for references to the cosmos. Hugely
popular, the field also spawned a fringe of
New Age groups, doomsday cultists, and the
racist insinuation that the Maya must have
had help from alien visitors.
In the past few years, slowly converging
lines of evidence have been restoring the
clearest picture yet of the stargazing knowl-
edge European colonizers fought so hard to
scrub away. Lidar surveys have identified
vast ceremonial complexes buried under
jungle and dirt, many of which appear to
be oriented to astronomical phenomena.
Archaeologists have excavated what looks
like an astronomers’ workshop and iden-
tified images that may depict individual
astronomers. Some Western scholars also
include today’s Maya as collaborators, not
just anthropological informants. They seek
insight into the worldview that drove Maya
astronomy, to learn not only what the an-
cient stargazers did, but why.
And some present-day Maya hope the col-
laborations can help recover their heritage.
In Zunil, members of the Poz Salanic family
have begun to search for fragments of the old
sky knowledge in surrounding communities.
“It’s more than just wanting the information,”
says Poz Salanic’s brother, Tepeu Poz Salanic,
a graphic designer and also a daykeeper. “We
say you’re waking up something that has
been sleeping for a long time, and you have
to do so with care.”AFTER THE SPANISH arrived in the 1500s,
the conquerors set out to extirpate Maya
knowledge and culture. Although the Span-
ish were aware of some of the intricacies of
Maya culture, including the 260-day calen-
dar, priests burned Maya texts, among them
accordion-folded books of bark paper called
codices, painted densely with illustrations
and hieroglyphs. “We found a large number
of books,” wrote a priest in Yucatán. “As they
contained nothing in which there were not
to be seen superstition and lies of the devil,
we burned them all, which they regretted
to an amazing degree, and which caused
them much affliction.” Only four looted pre-
colonial volumes surfaced later, all in for-
eign cities with vague chains of custody.
By the end of the 19th century, one codex
was in a library in Dresden, where it fell into
the hands of a German librarian and hobby-
ist mathematician named Ernst Förstemann.
He couldn’t puzzle out the hieroglyphs, but
he deciphered numbers written in a table.
These were dates in the 260-day sacred
cycle, Förstemann saw. And based on the in-
tervals of time between the dates, the table
had to be a guide to the motions of the planet
Venus, which cycles through a 584-day, four-
part dance in which it appears as the morn-
ing star, vanishes from the sky, reappears as
the evening star, then vanishes once more.
Since then, researchers studying the codi-
ces and stone inscriptions at archaeological
sites have recognized that precolonial Maya
clocked motions of the Sun, Moon, and
likely Mars with sophisticated algorithms;
that they likely aligned buildings to point at
particular sunrises; and that they inscribed
celestial context such as the phase of the
Moon into historical records.
Scholars have limited evidence of eachpractice, capturing narrow, through-a-key-
hole glimpses of customs that evolved across
a vast territory over thousands of years. But
the archaeological evidence suggests that
between 2000 or 3000 years ago, Maya com-
munities embraced a set of mathematical
concepts linked to celestial events and other
repeating patterns that influenced personal
rituals and public life, eventually growing
into an intricate, interlocking system.
One early and overarching goal was to me-
ter the flow of time. The first inscriptions of
the 260-day cycle, for example, date to this
early period. No one agrees on the precise sig-
nificance of the sacred count: It could be the
approximate interval between a missed pe-
riod and childbirth, how long it takes maize
to grow, or the product of 20, the fingers-
plus-toes base of Maya math, and 13, another
common Maya number that could itself be
justified by the number of days between a
first crescent Moon and full Moon.
Around this time, the early Maya also in-
vented a yearlong solar calendar that would
have been helpful for seasonal tasks such as
planting corn. By 2000 years ago, they had
begun to track a third calendar called the
Long Count, a cumulative, ongoing record
of days elapsed since the calendar’s puta-
tive zero date in 3114 B.C.E. This would have
enabled Maya scribes to scan back through
centuries of historical events on the ground
and in the sky.
Archaeologists think all these ideas and
their connections to celestial movements may
be enshrined in the crumbled architecture of
the Maya world. In one famous example from
late-stage Maya history, at the site of Chichén
Itzá in Mexico, a snake head sculpture sits at
the foot of a staircase going up a massive pyr-
amid. On every spring and fall equinox, when
night and day are the same length—and huge
throngs gather to watch—the Sun casts sharp,
triangular shadows down the staircase, creat-
ing what looks like the diamondback pattern
of a rattlesnake.
Then again, a similar shadow is cast for a
few days before and after the equinox, too.
Proponents can’t prove the 10th century
builders meant to mark this particular day,
nor can skeptics disprove it.
Given a starry sky’s worth of possible pat-
terns, says Ivan Šprajc, an archaeologist at
the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial
Studies in Slovenia, “The reality is that for
any alignment you can find some astronomi-
cal correlate.” But Maya scholars are now
identifying cases in which statistical weight
from many sites or other details lend extra
credibility to the astronomical links.TWO HOURS DOWNSLOPE from Zunil, dap-
pled light filters through the tree canopy at
Tak’alik Ab’aj, the ruins of a proto-Maya cityThe builders of monuments
like the eighth century C.E.
Temple of the Great Jaguar
in Tikal, Guatemala, carefully
observed stars and planets.