Scientists Think They've Finally Figured Out How a Maya Calendar Works

hubie writes:

Scientists Think They've Finally Figured Out How a Maya Calendar Works:

A cycle featured in Maya calendars has been a mystery pretty much since it was rediscovered and its deciphering began in the 1940s.

Covering a period of 819 days, the cycle is referred to simply as the 819-day count. The problem is that researchers couldn't match that 819 days up to anything.

But anthropologists John Linden and Victoria Bricker from Tulane University now think they've finally cracked the code. All they had to do was broaden their thinking, studying how the calendar worked over a period of not 819 days, but 45 years, and relate it to the time taken for a celestial object to appear to return to approximately the same point in the sky - what's referred to as the synodic period.

[...] "By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar."

The Maya calendar is actually a complicated system made up of smaller calendars, developed centuries ago in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Of the component calendars, the 819-day count is the most baffling to modern anthropologists.

[...] There were other clues to suggest that the 819-day count was associated with the synodic periods of visible planets in the Solar System. The Maya had extremely accurate measurements of the synodic periods of the visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.