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Unit 5 Essential Vocabulary and Maps Part 2

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Unit 5 Essential Vocabulary and Maps Part 2

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Incan Citadel

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The Mayan Calendar is an ancient dating system consisting of three separate calendars. Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Mayan civilization, used the calendar in Central America. Some modern communities still use it to this day.

Against popular belief, the Mayan calendar was not invented by the Mayans. Rather, the calendar is based on a system that had been in use since the 5th century BC, and the Mayans helped to develop it. Many civilizations such as the Olmec and the Aztecs were already using this system, before the Mayans.

How does the Mayan Calendar work

The Mayan Calendar is based on a system of 260 named days, and a year of 365 days. It is made of three calendars, which are put together to form a "Calendar Round" corresponding to 18,980 days, or 52 years.

How is the date determined in the Mayan Calendar

Dates are determined by their position on the Tzolkin and Haab calendars, and there are 18,980 unique combinations that identify the day in a 52-year cycle. The combinations are specified by the two wheels that make up the Mayan Calendar, which rotate in different directions. The largest wheel represents the Haab and the smallest one corresponds to the Tzolkin.

The Three Mayan Calendars

The Haab, the Tzolkin, and the Long Count are used together to calculate the days and count the time in the Mayan Calendar. They each have different characteristics and are used for separate purposes.

The Haab

The Haab is the civil calendar used by the Mayan civilization. It is a solar calendar, and it has 365 days.

This calendar is divided into 18 months, which have 20 days each. The extra 5 days at the end of the year make up their own month, called the Uayeb or "nameless days". On these 5 days, Mayan people would not leave their homes, as these were thought to be dangerous times.

The 19 months are represented in the outer ring of the Haab calendar by glyphs, which define a personality that is related to the month. Days are represented by a number, followed by the name of the month.

The Tzolkin

The Tzolkin (which translates to "count of days") is also known as the Divine Calendar. It represents the 260 days in the Maya Sacred Round and is used to determine the dates of religious days, harvests, and ceremonial events, such as weddings.

The 260 days are divided into 20 periods of 13 days each. The days are numbered from 1 to 13, and each period has a different name. These cycles of 13 and 20 repeat until they both get back to the first number and first name, after 260 days.

The Long Count

The Mayans also have an astronomical calendar, used to track longer periods of time, counting all the days since the beginning of the Universe, which the Mayans believed was August 11, 3114 B.C.

This calendar is cyclical, which means it has a beginning and an end, after which it starts again. Each cycle is about 7885 years. It is a Mayan belief that the Universe is destroyed and then regenerated at the start of each cycle of the Long Count.

Click here for more information on the history of BC and AD

When the world did not end

The previous Long Count cycle ended on December 21, 2012, leading many people to believe that the world would end that day. Despite experts in history and Mayan culture reiterating that the change in the cycle did not come with any prophecies of armageddons, newspaper headlines all over the world were captivated by the idea that Mayan prophecies indicated that the end of the world was nigh.

The Express: "World ending? Celebrate in style... This could be one of the last things you ever read if the ancient Mayan prediction that the world will come to an abrupt end turns out to be true."

The Guardian: "Mayan apocalypse looms large in the week ahead... Bad enough that the Christmas shopping is still not done, some people are preparing for the end of the world on 21 December"

Some prophecies were made that the only surviving village would be a small place in France known as Bugarach. So for several days, this village was famous, and visited by thousands of people, including media and journalists from across the world.

Whilst most people did not believe the doomsayers and felt confident that life would continue, some surveys showed that as many as one people in ten felt a sense of anxiety when thinking about the date.

The mass hysteria and media attention later became known as the 2012 phenomenon.

Where is the Mayan Calendar still used today
The Mayan civilization still has large populations that follow ancient traditions, customs, and beliefs. These populations are spread across Central America, in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and some parts of Mexico. Using the Mayan calendar is one of those customs that is followed by some people, but due to modernization, it is used for traditional rituals, rather than accurate time telling.

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The Mayan Calendar is an ancient dating system consisting of three separate calendars. Mesoamerican civilizations, such as the Mayan civilization, used the calendar in Central America. Some modern communities still use it to this day. Against popular belief, the Mayan calendar was not invented by...

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Etched into the high desert of southern Peru more than a millennium ago, the enigmatic Nasca lines continue to capture our imagination. More than a thousand of these geoglyphs (literally, 'ground drawings') sprawl across the sandy soil of Nasca province, the remains of little-understood ritual practices that may have been connected to life-giving rain.

Now, Peruvian archaeologists armed with drones have discovered more than 50 new examples of these mysterious desert monuments in adjacent Palpa province, traced onto the earth's surface in lines almost too fine to see with the human eye. In addition, archaeologists surveyed locally known geoglyphs with drones for the first time-mapping them in never-before-seen detail.

Some of the newfound lines belong to the Nasca culture, which held sway in the area from 200 to 700 A.D. However, archaeologists suspect that the earlier Paracas and Topará cultures carved many of the newfound images between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D.

Unlike the iconic Nasca lines-most of which are only visible from overhead-the older Paracas glyphs were laid down on hillsides, making them visible to villages below. The two cultures also pursued different artistic subjects: Nasca lines most often consist of lines or polygons, but many of the newfound Paracas figures depict humans.

"Most of these figures are warriors," says Peruvian archaeologist Luis Jaime Castillo Butters, the new glyphs' co-discoverer. "These ones could be spotted from a certain distance, so people had seen them, but over time, they were completely erased."

A View From the Sky and Space

The new geoglyphs add crucial data on the Paracas culture, as well as the mysterious Topará culture, which marked the transition between the Paracas and the Nasca. Centuries before the famous Nasca lines were made, people in the region were experimenting with making massive geoglyphs.

"This means that it is a tradition of over a thousand years that precedes the famous geoglyphs of the Nasca culture, which opens the door to new hypotheses about its function and meaning," says Peruvian Ministry of Culture archaeologist Johny Isla, the Nasca lines' chief restorer and protector.

Ironically, the discovery of the new geoglyphs was only made possible because of threats to previously known Nasca lines.

In December 2014, the environmentalist group Greenpeace staged a protest mere feet from the famous Nasca "hummingbird," damaging the area. In the resulting furor, Peru received a grant from the U.S. to help hire Isla and his restoration team.

Isla's work is extraordinarily difficult, and made even harder by spotty maps. Of the estimated 100,000 archaeological sites in Peru, Isla's colleague Castillo says only about 5,000 have been properly documented on the ground. Even fewer have been mapped from the air.

Castillo, a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru and the country's former vice-minister of cultural heritage, has long championed using drones and other aerial mapping techniques to catalog archaeological sites. Now, Isla and Castillo have much more data to work with, thanks to National Geographic Explorer and "space archaeologist" Sarah Parcak.

After winning the TED Prize in 2016, Parcak founded the GlobalXplorer initiative, which trains citizen scientists to analyze satellite imagery for archaeological sites and signs of looting. The platform's first project invited volunteers to look at satellite photos of Peru. ( Read more about the illegal antiquities trade-and how governments are fighting back.)

"When we were thinking about countries to go to ... it had to be a country that everyone in the world would know is important, where the Ministry of Culture would be open to new technology, and where most of the sites would be out in the open and fairly easy to detect," says Parcak, an archaeologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "Peru definitely fit the bill."

Hiding in Plain Sight

Once GlobalXplorer volunteers flagged potential targets in the satellite data that may be potential archaeological sites or instances of looting, Parcak then turned the target locations over to Peruvian archaeologists. With the support of the Sustainable Preservation Initiative, Castillo and three of his students embarked on a ground-truthing expedition funded by the National Geographic Society.

When Castillo's team visited Nasca and Palpa provinces in December 2017, they didn't find much evidence of fresh looting at the GlobalXplorer candidate targets. Instead, they found decades-old looting sites and encroachment fueled by the region's booming illegal gold mines.

But when researchers photographed the sites from overhead with drones, they found something new-and unexpected. The high-resolution images contained hints of dozens of ancient geoglyphs, carved into the desert crust.

How could so many geoglyphs hide in plain sight? Over time, many of the lines and figures have been reduced to faint depressions in the soil, visible only on 3-D scans of the terrain captured by the eagle-eye perspective provided by drones. And despite satellites' awe-inspiring surveillance power, they can't see everything.

The most powerful satellite that GlobalXplorer uses can see a foot-wide object from 383 miles above Earth's surface. That's the equivalent of seeing a single human hair from more than 650 feet away. But the lines that trace the newfound geoglyphs are mere inches across-too fine to spot from space.

Low-flying drones operating at altitudes of 200 feet or less, in contrast, can spot objects less than a half-inch wide. "The [drone camera] resolution is incredibly high," says Castillo.

More to Discover, More to Protect

Now that researchers have documented the newfound lines, they're eager to protect them. The new geoglyphs fall within the UNESCO World Heritage Site encompassing the Nasca and Palpa lines, and according to Isla, they are not under immediate threat.

However, the newfound lines have yet to be registered with the Peruvian Ministry of Culture. The lines' co-discoverer, Fabrizio Serván, a student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, says that the necessary maps and drawings are currently being drafted.

Perhaps the lines will soon have company. GlobalXplorer users have flagged hundreds of new potential sites that Peruvian archaeologists will continue ground truthing this fall and winter.

"The data and information obtained with the GlobalXplorer project are extraordinary in quality and quantity, and above all in a relatively short period of time," says Isla. "This puts us at the forefront in the registry of archaeological sites and geoglyphs in particular."

"We give the data to local experts: This is their cultural patrimony, they're the stakeholders," says Parcak. "We're providing a resource."

In the future, Parcak and Castillo say that GlobalXplorer data can help protect archaeological sites from unplanned urban and rural encroachment, which, beyond looting and the occasional errant truck driver, is by far the biggest threat facing Peru's geoglyphs.

Castillo describes the ongoing encroachment as "land trafficking": a sophisticated effort within Peru to forge deeds and build illegal housing by the acre, erasing the country's cultural heritage in the process.

"We're not fighting a looter with his shovel, running away when you're blowing a whistle; we're fighting an army of lawyers," he says. "This is a constant battle, so the work we're doing-documenting the sites, geo-referencing-is the best protection we can give the sites."

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Exclusive: New Nasca Lines Discovered in Peru

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Armed with satellites and drones, archaeologists discover new Nasca lines and dozens of other enigmatic geoglyphs carved into the earth.

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