Science - USA (2022-06-03)

SCIENCE science.org 3 JUNE 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6597 1041

CREDITS: (GRAPHIC
V. ALTOUNIAN/

SCIENCE

; (DATA
GABRIELLE VAIL/UNC CHAPEL HILL;

I. ŠPRAJC,

PLOS ONE

, 16:4 (2021
 HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.

the visitors turn and look east: Venus hangs

in the sky straight ahead over an expanse of

jungle, flanked closely by Mars and Saturn.

This vantage was created around 950 C.E.

when a new ruler in Uxmal known to archaeo-

logists as Lord Chac built up this complex.

It’s a long, raised structure that is blan-

keted with groups of five sculptures of Chac,

a Maya rain deity with a curling, trunk-

like nose. The façade also bears more than

350 glyphs signifying “Venus” or “star,” in-

cluding under each of Chac’s eyes. More

Chac sculptures, this time with the number

“8” etched above their eyes, adorn the build-

ing’s corners; in 2018, Uxmal’s director, ar-

chaeologist José Huchim Herrara of Mexico’s

National Institute of Anthropology and His-

tory, excavated the last two of these, confirm-

ing they share the same iconography.

Given that it takes Venus 8 years to go

through five cycles, this structure practi-

cally screams its affiliation with the planet.

Uxmal as a whole has been studied for de-

cades and attracts hundreds of thousands

of visitors. And yet archaeoastronomers and

living Maya are still working to parse this

building’s meaning. For example, on the day

the planet hits the southernmost point in the

sky it will ever reach, anyone standing before

dawn in the main door of the Governor’s

Palace and looking east would see a distant

pyramid almost exactly in line with Venus.

Aveni thinks the structures were positioned

to create this sightline.

But Huchim Herrara is partial to an-

other hypothesis: that the viewer is instead

meant to stand on a pyramid and look west

toward the building as Venus, in its guise

as the evening star, rises over the Venus-

spangled structure; then the key date

would be when Venus hits its northern-

most point. In 1990, Šprajc and Huchim

Herrara, seeking the not-yet-discovered

pyramid, followed the line from the Gov-

ernor’s Palace main door straight into the

jungle, slashing out a path with machetes.

After a long morning, they found a vast, un-

mapped mound known to their local guide

as Cehtzuc, which is still unexcavated.

If you stood on that mound, Venus’s

northernmost appearance would pass

directly over the Governor’s Palace and

would occur in early May, when the rainy

period starts in Yucatán. “The strongest

motivation for any of these things is vener-

ating water,” Huchim Herrara says.

For Ávila Vera, meanwhile, Uxmal stirs

deep memories. On her last day visiting

the site, she recounted a vivid recollection

from girlhood: sitting by the train tracks

under the shade of a tree, listening to sto-

ries about stars and ancient cities told by

her grandmother, a midwife in a small Yu-

catec Maya town in the 1940s.

Ancient sites like Uxmal, her grand-

mother had said, were not places they were

worthy to visit. They were sacred, ances-

tral homes to caretaker entities who would

need to grant permission. But much later

in life, Ávila Vera balanced that warning

with the desire to see a place at the heart

of her grandmother’s stories. She went in

to Uxmal with Hawkins.

Now, she has long since crossed another

threshold, going from receiving oral tradi-

tion to passing it forward. What her grand-

mother emphasized most by the train

tracks, Ávila Vera says, first in Spanish and

then in Yucatec, was the need to keep pass-

ing knowledge down to her own children.

“Le betik ka’abet a pak’ le nek’ tu ts’u a

puksik’al,” her grandmother told her. “You

have to plant the seed in your heart that

will set the foundation.” j

Joshua Sokol is a journalist in North Carolina.

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N sky

+90 d

W sky

+250 d

S sky

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sky ky

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sky S sk

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NEWS | FEATURES

1. Columns of glyphs link Venus to each cardinal
   direction. For example, in the left column, Venus is
   the morning star in the east.


2. Numbers indicate how many days each phase
   lasts, for a total of 584. This cycle then repeats.
   3. As the cycle progresses, mythic history unfolds
   in parallel. Modern scholars interpret the top
   illustration as Venus taking the form of a howler
   monkey deity who serves as a scribe or artisan.
   4. At bottom is a deity representing maize.
   Accompanying glyphs describe how the
   personified Venus spears that maize figure,
   who is then buried in the east.

Story in the sky

The Venus table on page 48 of the Dresden Codex mathematically describes the

planet’s motions in the night sky, alongside an epic narrative.