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14 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 7 SEPTEMBER 2022 SCIENCE ZUNIL, GUATEMALA—As the Sun climbs over a hillside ceremony, Ixquik Poz Salanic invokes a day in the sacred cal- endar: T'zi', a day for seeking justice. Before she passes the microphone to the next speaker, she counts to 13 in K'iche', an Indigenous Maya language with more than 1 million present-day speakers in Guatemala's central highlands. A few dozen onlook- ers nod along, from grandmoth- ers in traditional dresses to vis- iting schoolchildren shifting politely in their seats. Then the crowd joins a counterclockwise procession around a fire at the mouth of a cave, shuffle dancing to the beat of three men playing marimba while they toss offer- ings of candles, copal, and in- cense to the wind-licked flames. Poz Salanic, a lawyer, serves as a daykeeper for her community, which means she keeps track of a 260-day cycle—20 days count- ed 13 times—that informs Maya ritual life. In April, archaeologists announced they had deciphered a 2300-year-old inscription bear- ing a date in this same calendar format, proving it was in use mil- lennia ago by the historic Maya, who lived across southeastern Mexico and Central America. In small villages like this one, the Maya calendar kept ticking through conquest and centuries of persecution. As recently as the 1990s, "Everything we did today would have been called witchcraft," says fellow daykeeper Roberto Poz Pérez, Poz Salanic's father, af- ter the day count concludes and everyone has enjoyed a lunch of tamales. The 260-day calendar is a still-spinning engine within what was once a much larger machine of Maya knowledge: a vast corpus of written, quantitative Indige- nous science that broke down the natural world and human exist- ence into interlocking, gearlike cycles of days. In its service, Maya astronomers described the move- ments of the Sun, Moon, and planets with world-leading pre- cision, for example tracking the waxing and waning of the Moon to the half-minute. In the 19th century, Western science belatedly began to com- prehend 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 calendar. That discovery—or rediscovery—set off a still-ongo- ing wave of research into Maya astronomy. Researchers scoured archaeological 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 knowledge 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 astronomi- cal phenomena. Archaeologists have excavated what looks like an astronomers' workshop and identified images that may depict individual astronomers. Some Western scholars also include to- day's Maya as collaborators, not just anthropological informants. They seek insight into the world- view that drove Maya astronomy, to learn not only what the ancient stargazers did, but why. And some present-day Maya hope the collaborations can help recover their heritage. In Zunil, members of the Poz Salanic fam- ily have begun to search for frag- ments 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 day- keeper. "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 Spanish were aware of some of the intri- cacies of Maya culture, includ- ing the 260-day calendar, 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 amaz- ing degree, and which caused them much affliction." Only four looted precolonial volumes sur- faced later, all in foreign cities with vague chains of custody. By the end of the 19th centu- ry, one codex was in a library in Dresden, where it fell into the hands of a German librarian and hobbyist 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 intervals of time between the dates, the table had to be a guide to the motions of the planet Venus, which cy- cles through a 584-day, four-part dance in which it appears as the morning star, vanishes from the sky, reappears as the evening star, then vanishes once more. Since then, researchers study- ing the codices and stone inscrip- tions at archaeological sites have recognized that precolonial Ma- ya clocked motions of the Sun, Moon, and likely Mars with so- phisticated 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 each practice, capturing nar- row, through-a-keyhole 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 communities embraced a set of mathematical concepts linked to celestial events and other re- peating patterns that influenced personal rituals and public life, eventually growing into an intri- cate, interlocking system. One early and overarching goal was to meter 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 significance of the sacred count: It could be the approximate interval between a missed period 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 num- ber that could itself be justified by the number of days between a first crescent Moon and full Moon. Around this time, the early Ma- ya also invented 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 putative zero date in 3114 B.C.E. This would have enabled Maya scribes to scan back through cen- turies of historical events on the ground and in the sky. Archaeologists think all these ideas and their connections to celestial movements may be en- shrined in the crumbled archi- tecture 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 pyramid. 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 shad- ows down the staircase, creating 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. Propo- nents can't prove the 10th cen- tury builders meant to mark this particular day, nor can skeptics disprove it. Given a starry sky's worth of possible patterns, says Ivan Špra- jc, an archaeologist at the In- stitute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies in Slovenia, "The The stargazers: understanding the Maya