1040 3 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6597 science.org SCIENCE
PHOTO: SERGIO MONTÚFAR/PINCELADASNOCTURNAS.COM/ESTheir astronomical knowledge lingers,
too, especially folklore and stories with ag-
ricultural or ecological import that have
been assembled over lifetimes of systematic
observation. When anthropologists visited
Maya communities in the 20th century, for
example, they found the 260-day calendar
and elements of the solar calendar still cy-
cling, and experts who could divine the time
of night by watching the stars spin overhead.
“Everybody just assumes that the knowledge
has been erased, that nobody is looking at
the sky,” says Jarita Holbrook, an academic at
the University of Edinburgh who has studied
Indigenous star knowledge in Africa, the Pa-
cific, and Mesoamerica. “They’re wrong.”
A FEW DAYS AFTER the fire ceremony in Gua-
temala, at the other end of the Maya world
in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, Maya elder
María Ávila Vera, 84, shuffles with a cane
along a path through Uxmal, an ancient city
turned tourist magnet. With city lights far
away, the late evening sky has deepened to
an inky black. Looking up at the Greek con-
stellation Orion, she starts to tell a story she
learned in childhood about three stars in a
line, symbolizing a traditional planting of
corn, beans, and squash.
Unlike more detached Western ap-
proaches to studying natural phenomena,
many Maya and their collaborators be-
lieve that knowledge is intricately linked
to places and relationships. In this view,
one of the best ways to understand past as-
tronomers is to visit the places where they
scanned the skies.
At Uxmal, Isabel Hawkins walks by
Ávila Vera’s side, proffering a steady arm.
Hawkins, a former astrophysicist, became
fascinated with Maya culture after she be-
gan working in science education. She be-
friended local archaeologists, Indigenous
knowledge holders like the Zunil daykeep-
ers, Mesoamerican academics—and Ávila
Vera, whom she met at an astronomy pre-
sentation to a Yucatec community in the
San Francisco Bay Area.
In November 2019, this loose network
gathered for a trip through Guatemala and
Honduras to collaborate under a new set of
methods called cultural astronomy, which
emphasizes reciprocal relationships with
living Indigenous sources in addition to
archaeological ruins and ancient texts.
“Instead of feeling that we were behind
what’s going on in other areas of the world,
we felt that we were contributing to a new
concept,” say Tomás Barrientos, an archaeo-
logist who hosted part of the meeting at the
University of the Valley of Guatemala.
A central task for cultural astronomers is
simply to save living star lore and oral tradi-
tions that stretch back into deep time. This
often involves assembling puzzle pieces.
After meeting Hawkins, daykeeper Tepeu
Poz Salanic began to search for surviving
star stories in the Guatemalan highlands.
He often visits nearby towns to play in a re-
vived version of the ancient Maya ball game
and at each stop, asks whether locals know
about the stars.
One representation of ancient Maya star
stories is preserved in the Paris Codex.
Among the constellations it mentions are a
deer and a scorpion, but the illustrations in
the codex don’t come with patterns of dots
to match with stars.
Locals in the town of Santa Lucía Utatlán
told Tepeu Poz Salanic there was a deer in
the night sky but didn’t recall where. But he
knew that in the Guatemalan highlands to-day, the stars in what the Greeks called the
constellation Scorpio are also thought of as
a scorpion. (No one knows whether stories
from two continents converged, or they got
muddled together after colonization.) The
scorpion’s K’iche’ name is pa raqan kej, “un-
der the deer’s leg,” Poz Salanic reported in
2021 in the Research Notes of the American
Astronomical Society. He thinks the deer
constellation from the Paris Codex may be
above the scorpion’s tail, in the constella-
tion Western astronomers call Sagittarius.
For her part, Ávila Vera remembers prac-
tical uses of stargazing. Her godfather once
brought her to a corn field before dawn and
pointed to a bundle of stars that were soon
washed away in the light of the rising Sun.
Those stars were the Pleiades—in Yucatec,
tsab, or the rattle of the snake—and he
told her that the cluster’s predawn appear-
ances began as the harvest approached. If
the stars in the cluster looked distinct in-
stead of blurry, it meant a clear atmosphere,
sunny skies, and a good crop. (Similar prac-
tices persist in Indigenous communities
in the Andes; in 2000, a team of scientists
argued in Nature that a blurry view of the
early dawn Pleiades can reliably tip off vil-
lagers to expect El Niño conditions and less
rain months later.)AT 4:30 A.M. IN UXMAL, the stars are shining
through a thin mist, the Moon is a few days
removed from full, and place, nature, and
scholarship collide. Hawkins and archaeo-
logist Héctor Cauich of Mexico’s National
Institute of Anthropology and History mount
steep steps to a massive complex called the
Governor’s Palace. Bats flutter past their
heads, returning to roost in the structure.
Reaching the ancient building’s main door,In Zunil, Guatemala, daykeeper Willy Barreno conducts a ceremony. Daykeepers rely on the ancient 260-day calendar to schedule ceremonies and give advice.