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15 maltatoday | WEDNESDAY • 7 SEPTEMBER 2022 SCIENCE Maya and their sophisticated astronomy reality is that for any alignment you can find some astronomical correlate." But Maya scholars are now identifying cases in which statistical weight from many sites or other details lend extra credi- bility to the astronomical links. Two hours downslope from Zu- nil, dappled light filters through the tree canopy at Tak'alik Ab'aj, the ruins of a proto-Maya city laid out in a neat grid along a trade route. There, a battered stone stela excavated in 1989 bears a Long Count date fragment that may refer to an unknown event around 300 B.C.E. Christa Schieber de Lavarreda, the site's archaeological director, points to a flat stone, considered an altar, found face-up just a few feet away, which archaeologists think was installed at the same time as the stela. Its surface is indented with delicate carvings of two bare feet, toe pads in- cluded, as if a person stood there and sank in a few centimeters. "Very ergonomic," she jokes. If someone stood in those prints, she says, they would have faced where the Sun rose over the ho- rizon on the winter solstice, the year's shortest day. For Zunil daykeepers and other Indigenous groups, sites like this are sacred places where ancient knowledge comes alive; their right to conduct ceremonies here is codified in Guatemalan law. The surrounding ancient city contains more clues to ancient astronomical awareness. The plaza containing the date in- scription, for example, belongs to a common style that Maya city planners apparently followed for more than 1000 years. The east- ern side of the plaza features a low, horizontal platform running roughly north to south, with a higher structure in the middle. On the western side is a pyramid topped with a temple or the erod- ed nub of one (see graphic). Beginning in the 1920s, ar- chaeologists began to clamber up these pyramids in the early mornings and look east, toward the rising Sun over the platform, suspecting the complexes might mark particular solar positions. A stream of recent data supports the idea, Šprajc says. In 2021, he analyzed 71 such plazas scattered through Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, measured either with sur- veying equipment on his own jungle forays or with lidar, a laser technology sensitive to the faint footprints of ruins now buried un- der forest and earth. In the most widespread shared orientation, someone standing on the central pyramids would see the morning Sun crest over the middle struc- ture of the opposite platform twice a year: 12 February and 30 October, with a suggestive 260 days in between. Perhaps, Špra- jc argued in PLOS ONE, these specific sunrises could have been marked with public gatherings or acted as a kickoff for planting or harvesting festivals. Ongoing research suggests de- signers of even older architecture shared a similar worldview. In 2020, archaeologist Takeshi Ino- mata of the University of Arizo- na used lidar data to spot a vast, elevated rectangular platform, with 20 subplatforms around its edges, that stretched 1.4 kilome- ters in Tabasco, Mexico. Report- ed in Nature, the structure dates back to between 1000 and 800 B.C.E., before direct archaeolog- ical records of Maya writing and calendar systems. At the big com- plex's very center, Inomata found the raised outlines of the pyra- mid-and-platform "E-group" lay- out thought to be a solar marker. In a 2021 study in Nature Hu- man Behaviour, Inomata used lidar to identify 478 smaller rec- tangular complexes of similar age scattered across Veracruz and Tabasco; many have similar orientations linked to sunrises on specific dates. In unpublished work with Šprajc and archaeoas- tronomer Anthony Aveni of Col- gate University, Inomata is now reanalyzing the lidar maps to see what sunrises people at those spaces might have looked to, per- haps dates separated by 20-day multiples from the solar zenith passage, when the Sun passes di- rectly overhead. For later periods of Maya histo- ry, scholars seeking astronomical evidence rely more on inscrip- tions. Long after the Tabasco platform was erected, during a monument-building florescence spanning most of the first millen- nium C.E. called the Classic Peri- od, generations of Maya lavished attention on calculating the dates of new and full Moons, sorting out the challenging arithmetic of the lunar cycle's ungainly 29.53 days. At Copan in modern-day Honduras and surrounding cities, early 20th century archaeologists found engravings that record one "formula" for tracking the Moon that is only off by about 30 sec- onds per month from the value measured today; at Palenque, in southern Mexico, another ver- sion of the same formula is even more accurate. The four surviving codices— housed in Dresden, Madrid, Par- is, and New York City—offer a glimpse of a still-later period of Maya civilization, between the Xultún workshop and the last centuries before Spanish con- quest. These books were like- ly painted around the 1400s in Yucatán. But researchers think they contain much older records charting exactly how the Sun, Moon, and planets had appeared in the sky centuries before, from the eighth through the 10th cen- turies, according to Long Count dates in the Venus table and a ta- ble of solar eclipses. After the Maya script was de- ciphered in the 1980s and '90s, scholars began to probe the Ve- nus table's larger cultural pur- pose. Epigrapher Gabrielle Vail at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Tulane Uni- versity archaeologist Christine Hernández argued in 2013, for example, that the table recounts battles between Venus and the Sun, in a fusion of creation stories from the Maya and what is now central Mexico. The table traces how Venus oscillates through its morning star-evening star routine almost exactly five times in 8 years, alongside illustrations that depict meetings between Venus in deity form and other godlike figures. Armed with this table, Vail says, a forerunner of today's daykeepers could anticipate on what dates in the 260-day calendar such ap- pearances might fall, and what omens they might hold. Even the "almost" in Venus's schedule was considered: An ad- ditional set of correction factors, provided on another page in the Dresden Codex, helps correct for how the cycle slips by a few days per century. In a book published in March, Gerardo Aldana, a Maya scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, builds a case that the astronomer who devised the "correction" for the Venus pre- dictions was a woman working around 900 C.E. He points to a figure depicted in a carving on a structure interpreted as a Venus observatory at Chichén Itzá, who wears a long skirt and a feathered serpent headdress—iconography imported from central Mexico and associated with Venus that took over in that city around that time. In another mural, a similarly dressed figure with breasts walks in a massive procession rich with feathered serpent ideology. After the arrival of the Spanish in the early 16th century, coloniz- ers destroyed countless codices as well as the Maya glyph system, and the long-term, quantitative sky tracking it enabled. Yet the Maya and their culture persist, with some 7 million people still speaking one or more of 30 Ma- yan-descended languages. Their astronomical knowledge lingers, too, especially folklore and stories with agricultural or ecological import that have been assembled over lifetimes of systematic observation. When anthropologists visited Maya communities in the 20th centu- ry, for example, they found the 260-day calendar and elements of the solar calendar still cycling, 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 knowl- edge in Africa, the Pacific, and Mesoamerica. "They're wrong."

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