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Chapter 1

Questions, Hypotheses, and Assorted Detours

All research begins with a question -- often a host of
questions. I suppose that the first time I asked the question that
resulted in this book was when I was a sophomore in an anthropology
class at the University of Michigan back in 1944. "How," I queried my
professor, "did the Maya ever come up with a calendar that had only
260 days?" His answer was as honest as it was unsatisfying: "No one
really knows."

This was, of course, not the kind of question that one
loses any sleep over or that begs for an immediate reply. After all,
if it hadn't been answered in over a thousand years, the solution to
this enigma, intriguing as it might be, could probably wait a while
longer. As it turned out, it did not capture my own attention again
until nearly thirty years later when, quite by accident, I stumbled
onto what seemed to be a credible answer while leading my first
student field trip to Mexico in the winter of 1973.

In the meantime, the checkered course of my evolution
from university undergraduate to professor of geography, then at
Middlebury College in Vermont, had taken me through a series of
episodes as a cartographic researcher with the Army Map Service in
Washington, D.C.; a pilot cadet in the U.S. Air Force; the first
graduate student in geography at the University of Texas; and a
Fulbright grantee to Norway. Along the way, I had married a lovely
Norwegian woman, fathered two attractive daughters, and settled down
in a charming 200-year-old farmhouse replete with a mountain view and
a nearby covered bridge to teach at a prestigious New England college.
By that time, most of my research and writing had found its focus in
Europe.

The field trip to Mexico was my first real opportunity
to visit a region which had been the primary object of my earliest
academic interests. In addition to majoring in geography, I had taken
minors in both anthropology and geology, and immersed myself in the
study of history as well as the Spanish and Portuguese languages to
prepare myself for a career in Latin America. Now, given the
opportunity to develop a brief but innovative inter-session course, my
long-latent interest surfaced once more in an offering which I titled
"Civilization and Environment in the American Tropics."

For five eventful weeks I drove a vanful of excited
students from Vermont to the Yucatán and back. In that hectic
itinerary we included visits to as many archaeological sites in as
many different natural settings as we could possibly reach. And at all
of them we examined the various aspects of the ceremonial center's
location, as well as its surrounding patterns of landforms, climate,
soil, and vegetation. However, when it came to an interpretation of
the artwork and architecture of the site itself, we invariably
deferred to the local guide or a tourist's handbook.

One morning in late January 1973, as my students and I
lounged in the shade of "El Caracol" -- the snail-shaped observatory
at Chichén Itzá -- my unanswered undergraduate question suddenly
flashed into my mind. We were listening to a Mexican guide explain the
dramatic interplay of light and shadow on the façade of the great El
Castillo pyramid at the time of the equinoxes. As he spoke, I wondered
if the strange 260-day calendar of the Maya might not have marked the
interval between two successive passages of the vertical sun somewhere
here in the tropics.

There was no way to test that hypothesis -- at least
none that suggested itself to me during our grueling drive back to
Vermont. But once I had returned to campus, I immediately made a dash
to the college library. The first question I had to answer was at what
latitude such a phenomenon would take place.  And the second was
whether such a latitude lay anywhere in the vicinity of where the Maya
lived.

Getting out a solar ephemeris (a volume published
annually by the government for astronomers and navigators which
provides the latitude of the sun for each day of the year), I quickly
discovered that a 260-day interval can in fact be measured in Central
America at latitude 14º.8 N, as well as at the same distance south of
the equator in the general area of southern Peru and Bolivia. Of the
two options it was naturally the first that interested me most, for I
found that the parallel of 14º.8 N ran across the southeasternmost
corner of Mexico and the entire width of the countries of Guatemala
and Honduras.

What the ephemeris also revealed was that such a
260-day interval could only be measured between the time that the sun
passed southward over that line until its next crossing in a northerly
direction. Thus, in the sun's apparent annual migration from tropic to
tropic, it took 260 days for it to travel from 14º.8 N latitude to the
Tropic of Capricorn and return, whereas only 105 days were required
for the sun to go up to and return from the Tropic of Cancer. Most
intriguing of all, however, was the date on which this 260-day
interval commenced. It was August 13 -- the day the Maya believed that
the present age of the world had begun!

While this seemed too fortuitous to be a coincidence,
the very location of the critical parallel also left me in stunned
disbelief. It ran right through Copán, the great ceremonial center in
the mountains of western Honduras which had served as the Maya's
principal seat of astronomical studies. Was this, too, just a
coincidence?

Additional library research soon provided some answers
but also raised some new questions. The archaeological literature told
me that Copán dated to the fifth century A.D., whereas it also
revealed that the sacred 260-day calendar was in existence at least as
early as 400-300 B.C. (The actual occupation of the Copán valley by
early farmers had begun at least by 1000 B.C., but the first evidence
of an advanced level of "civilization" in the area is a stela with a
date equivalent to A.D. 426.) Thus, while the astronomy of Copán was
correct, the ceremonial center had been founded about 800 years too
late to have served as the calendar's birthplace.

Continuing my readings, I encountered an observation
made by a German naturalist, Hans Gadow, that made especially good
sense to me as a geographer. Writing about the turn of the century,
Gadow, like so many researchers both before and since, was intrigued
by the origins of the strange 260-day calendar. He was convinced that
it had to have been the product of a lowland tropical setting, because
its days were named for such animals as alligators, monkeys, and
iguanas, which do not live in highland environments. I knew that such
creatures would certainly not be found amidst the pine and oak forests
surrounding Copán, so now I had the additional reason of geography for
rejecting what had seemed at first glance to be both a facile and
obvious solution. (Only later did I learn that several earlier
researchers already had fallen into what I soon came to label the
"Copán trap" because they had overlooked both the historical and
geographical constraints of the sacred calendar.)

Of course, to answer my original question, I now had to
return to the map of archaeological sites to see if I could find one
that not only lay along the parallel of 14º. 8 N, but that also was
situated in a lowland tropical niche and that was in existence at
least as early as 400 B. C.

Zeroing in on the "lowland ecological niche" was easy,
because it could only exist in one of two places: it was either to be
found on the western (Pacific) coastal plain of Mexico or on the
eastern (Caribbean) coastal plain of Honduras. Because the parallel of
14º.8 N ran through the mountainous core of Central America for most
of its length, the only lowlands it crossed were on either end of this
line. Deciding which of the two lowland areas it might have been --
Pacific versus Caribbean -- was also quickly resolved, because only a
few Indians inhabit the swampy, trade wind-soaked rain forests of
eastern Honduras even to this day. On the other hand, in the narrow
coastal plain of southernmost Mexico my map of archaeological sites
showed what was described as an "important ceremonial center in Late
Pre-Classic times": a place named Izapa that had never been mentioned
in any of my anthropology courses, and that certainly was unfamiliar
to me. Nevertheless, what mattered was that Izapa had the "right"
astronomy, the "right" geography, and the "right" history; indeed, it
was the only site in all of the pre-Columbian New World that did! I
was excited enough by this striking convergence of clues to dash off
an article describing my hypothesis and submit it to the magazine
Science, which published it in early September 1973.

CONFRONTATION AND CHALLENGE

Among the many letters which poured in congratulating
me on my deductions and asking for reprints of my article was one
postmarked in England. It was a note from the dean of Maya
archaeologists, Sir John Eric Sydney Thompson, and he was clearly
unhappy with my conclusions -- so unhappy, it appears, that in an
exchange of letters later published in Science one of his disciples
accused me of having been "anticipated" by earlier, subsequently
"discredited" researchers whom I, perhaps knowingly, had failed to
acknowledge.

Naturally, I was taken aback by the hostile, almost
vitriolic tone of this response, and I began to wonder what sensitive
nerve I had touched to elicit such a harsh indictment. After all, to
my mind I had simply put forward an original hypothesis which seemed
to make sense and deserved to be debated in a broader academic forum.
I could not imagine why the "big guns" in the field of archaeology
found my reasoning so distasteful.

As time went by, several facets of the confrontation
became clearer. The contention that my hypothesis had been
"anticipated" by earlier researchers was accurate in only one
particular. I found from a review of the literature that the
conclusion that the 260-day calendar derived from the interval between
zenithal sun passages near the 15th parallel of north latitude had
been reached by at least three scholars: Zelia Nuttall in 1928, Ola
Apenes in 1936, and Rafael Girard in 1948. The first two had fallen
into the "Copán trap," as I nearly had myself, while Girard, as a
nationalistic Guatemalan, had insisted that the calendar had been
developed in the highlands of his country and not in neighboring
Honduras. Thus, none of these researchers had truly "anticipated" me
by pinpointing the locus of the calendar's birthplace in Izapa, even
though the same facts of history and geography should have been known
to each of them as were known to me.

Moreover, I found that in 1945 Robert Merrill had
pointed out the correspondence between the date of the sun's southward
zenithal passage over the latitude of Copán and the beginning date of
the present epoch of the Maya world. But I also learned that Merrill's
observation had been summarily dismissed as a "coincidence" by
Thompson. Thus, even this early in the "confrontation," I sensed that
the latter's response seemed to be part of a definite pattern -- to
wit, anyone at odds with J. Eric Sydney Thompson could obviously
expect trouble!

It was only much later that I realized how accurate my
initial perception was. Some years after Thompson had passed away, the
distinguished Yale anthropologist Michael Coe candidly admitted in
print how fortunate he counted himself for not having invoked
Thompson's "caustic criticism," even though he had dared disagree with
him as a graduate student. (Thankfully, the discipline of geography
has never had so chilling a father figure in its cast of characters.)

There was another reason for the cool reception my
hypothesis had received from the anthropological fraternity. At the
time my Science article appeared, I had no idea that an internecine
struggle was raging within the discipline over one of the most
divisive issues imaginable: the question of which people had been the
true founders of civilization in Mesoamerica -- the name by which the
region of high culture in Mexico and Central America is defined. Was
it the Maya, who without question represented the ultimate in
pre-Columbian cultural sophistication within the region, or was it the
still somewhat shadowy people known as the Olmecs? The anthropologists
and archaeologists were polarized into two opposing camps with strong
antagonisms for each other's point of view. The "Mayanistas" were led
by such notables as the Englishman Thompson and the American Sylvanus
Morley, while the "Olmequistas" were comprised chiefly of Mexican
anthropologists. Unbeknownst to me, by arguing for the calendar's
birthplace in Izapa, I had inadvertently joined the Olmec camp, and if
for no other reason than that, I found the entire "Mayanista" faction
of the discipline arrayed against me.

Even though I somewhat belatedly came to understand how
Thompson's domineering personality and the internal struggle between
the "Mayanistas" and "Olmequistas" had both conspired to generate such
negative reactions to my hypothesis, I should have been aware at the
outset that my real transgression was not being a card-carrying
anthropologist or archaeologist. Here was I, a geographer, invading
the turf of "their" discipline and daring to suggest a solution to a
problem that had engaged them in more than a half century of research
and debate.

Although I was scheduled to spend the spring term of
1974 doing research at the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization in Rome, in view of the antagonism which my Science
article had generated I decided that I must devote at least six weeks
of that time to a field reconnaissance of southern Mexico and western
Honduras. Only in that way could I actually see for myself the place
where my deductions had told me the sacred calendar had been born.
And, only by making a pilgrimage to Copán could I confirm my
conclusion that the calendar had given rise to it, and not the other
way around. Indeed, by now it had become a "matter of honor" for me to
determine whether I could have been so misguided in my deductions, or
if the problem lay with "them." Certainly, I was under no illusion
that the anthropologists or archaeologists had any more of a corner on
the "truth" or on logic than a geographer did. If what I found failed
to support my hypothesis, I would say so, and put the matter to rest
once and for all. But if I was reassured that I was "onto something,"
I vowed to keep looking for the proof for as long as it took me to
make my case.

PIECING TOGETHER THE PUZZLE: A PRE-COLUMBIAN "WHODUNIT"

So many new, exciting, and unexpected discoveries
emerged from my first visit to Izapa that even before I had left that
awe-inspiring site I was convinced that I really was "onto something."
However, little or nothing of what I learned at Izapa had ever
appeared in print. Indeed, apart from a few cursory digs which had
been carried out there in the 1940's, its systematic excavation had
begun only in 1962 under the auspices of the New World Archaeological
Foundation, funded by Brigham Young University. Just wandering amongst
Izapa's 130-odd mounds and pyramids, experiencing first-hand its
tropical rain forest setting, and trying to imagine what the carvers
of its flamboyant, enigmatic sculptures were trying to commemorate was
something that a lifetime in a library carrel or a classroom could
never duplicate.

As I stood musing over the site from the summit of its
highest mound, I realized as never before that what the geographer
looks for in the field and the kinds of questions he or she asks are
entirely different from those that the archaeologist or anthropologist
is trained to investigate. The latter seek to establish a temporal
context into which to fit the various artifacts which their
excavations uncover, and for most of the history of these disciplines
that has meant using stratigraphy -- working out the age of a site by
a careful examination of the layers of soil which have accumulated
over it. More recently (beginning in the 1950's), radiocarbon dating
replaced stratigraphic analysis as the primary tool in establishing
chronological horizons, in many instances resulting in substantial
revisions of dates fixed by stratigraphic means. (Indeed, as my own
research progressed, it was both ironic and reassuring that where my
findings initially appeared to be at odds with the generally accepted,
stratigraphically determined chronology of a site, once the
radiocarbon results came in, they invariably served to lend additional
support to my hypotheses.)

Moreover, when it came to understanding the spatial
context of a place, where it was located, and how it was related to
its surroundings, I found that there was little helpful information to
be gleaned from the literature of our sister disciplines. Nowhere, for
example, would I have discovered that the entire ceremonial center of
Izapa was aligned to a towering volcano on the northern horizon, or
that from its main pyramid the length of the solar year could be
calibrated at the summer solstice against the highest volcano in all
of Central America. Seeing at the edge of the jungle clearing a statue
of a man on his knees worshipping the mountain and along the side of
the ball court a bas-relief depicting a seaborne visitor to the site
told me that Izapa was a very special place indeed.

But now I also realized that I would have to carefully
reexamine most of the ceremonial centers I had so hurriedly visited on
my earlier reconnaissance, because only now was I beginning to ask
"the right questions": What was the site's spatial relationship to the
surrounding topographic features? And was there any significance to
the internal design and layout of the ceremonial center or to the
orientation of its principal structures? So, even before I said my
first farewell to Izapa, I was already making plans for my next
research trip to Mexico the following winter.

My 1975 junket to Mexico produced two more exciting
discoveries -- one which confirmed my basic hypothesis regarding the
origin of the 260-day calendar as nothing else could have, and the
other which added an entirely new and unexpected twist to my research.
Since the buzzwords of that expedition were alignments and
orientations, when my students and I arrived at Teotihuacán, I
immediately put them to work trying to decipher the layout of the
great metropolis. At its peak, this immense ceremonial center on the
outskirts of modern Mexico City had been the largest urban center in
the New World, and for a time it was one of the three largest cities
on our planet. When we discovered that it was oriented to the setting
sun on August 13, that could only mean that the city's founders --
although they were over 1000 km (600 mi) from Izapa -- had already
been engulfed by a "wave of calendrical diffusion" a couple of
centuries before the dawn of the Christian era!

The second discovery was made at Izapa itself, while
checking the alignment of a couple of freestanding sculptures off to
the side of one of the main pyramids. Although the first sculpture, a
representation of a rattlesnake's head, produced no surprises, the
second (which my students and I identified as the head of a turtle)
proved to be strongly magnetic in its snout. Had its sculptor not been
aware of its magnetic lines of force, its pole of attraction would
probably have been randomly situated in the eye or the ear of the
creature instead. My paper reporting the discovery of what was
probably the oldest magnetic artifact in the world was published by
the British science journal Nature early in February 1976.

By the time of the article's publication, my own
professional evolution had taken a new turn, for at the beginning of
that year I had accepted a position as professor at Dartmouth College
in Hanover, New Hampshire. Making such a career change in the middle
of the winter had one drawback: It prevented me from carrying out
further fieldwork in Mexico in 1976. On the other hand, an important
compensatory trade-off was in gaining access to Dartmouth's impressive
computer facilities. I therefore decided to write a computer program
incorporating those parameters of the Maya calendrical system on which
there was the most general agreement and then proceed to run it
"backward" -- from Spanish colonial times to whenever -- to see if I
could establish when each of its components, the 365-day secular
calendar and the 260-day sacred almanac, had come into being. In the
process, I also thought that it might be possible to determine when
the Maya had undertaken a reform in their calendar by selecting a new
new year's day, as well as to establish when their so-called Long
Count had come into being. The latter was an extremely sophisticated
innovation whose European counterpart was not developed until the
sixteenth century!

One of the results of this computer exercise -- the
date of the origin of the Long Count -- proved to be not only
"credible" but also confirmative of one of the many researchers who
had earlier run afoul of Thompson; however, the other three seemed to
leave me even further out "on thin ice" than I had been with my
initial hypothesis and would surely open me up to an additional
barrage from the archaeological community. I therefore held off
publishing my findings, because in one instance I was projecting a
calendar reform among the Maya 600 years before the city at which it
supposedly took place had been founded, and in the other two
instances, my calculations showed that both the secular and sacred
calendars were about a millennium older than Izapa was supposed to be!
(In each of these instances, newer radiocarbon dates ultimately came
to my rescue, and all of my far-out computer results have subsequently
been vindicated.)

The winter of 1976 was also a time for intense map
research, and the results of that exercise proved fully as rewarding
as my computer project had been. As I pored over large-scale maps of
the major ceremonial centers of Mesoamerica, I found that time after
time they replicated the locational principle which I had first
discovered in Izapa: Their solar orientation at one of the solstices
invariably aligned with the highest mountain within view. (In other
words, the location of the ceremonial center had been consciously
chosen so as to align with the highest point at sunrise or sunset on
either June 22 or December 22.) It was as though the sun-god himself
had decreed the location of native American cities, for each of them
employed a commanding topographic feature to calibrate the march of
time. When I sent a couple of research papers describing my computer
reconstruction of the Maya calendar and the locational principle of
pre-Columbian cities to the editor of the Journal of the History of
Astronomy in Cambridge, England, he encouraged me to combine them into
one longer treatise, which I did, and this was published in 1978.

In the meantime, I had made a further research trip to
Mesoamerica in the winter of 1977. Although my student assistants and
I had ranged from the far northern desert of Mexico to El Salvador and
Honduras on our journey, our principal accomplishment was to visually
confirm many of the alignments I had first measured on the maps.

The following winter I was back in Mexico again, and
this time my primary focus was the site of the supposed Maya calendar
reform. Not only did I find the proof I was looking for, but I also
confirmed that the Maya had used the August 13th sunset to orient the
first great city which they had constructed. Exciting as these
discoveries were, I also identified what is probably the oldest lunar
observatory in the New World -- a totally unexpected bonus!

The year 1978 also marked my first research trip to
South America. Its mission was to locate possible antecedents to the
calendars of Mesoamerica; here, a negative result proved reassuring.
In the autumn of the same year, while leading a Dartmouth Foreign
Study Program to Sweden, I had occasion to identify a monument on the
south coast of the country as the Swedish equivalent of Stonehenge.
Composed of some 200 tons of mammoth stones arranged in the shape of a
ship, it stands on a morainic bluff overlooking the Baltic Sea. (By
this time, of course, I couldn't even take my wife on a Sunday picnic
without looking for alignments and orientations.) The Swedish
antiquities board had described this monument as a "late Iron Age
burial" (i.e., A.D. 400-1050). This unplanned detour into megalithic
astronomy lasted another year, for the autumn of 1979 was again spent
in Scandinavia attempting to find other calendrical monuments
attributable to the same culture. (This brief foray into European
archaeoastronomy did generate an article for a Swedish scientific
journal which managed to stir the pot on the far side of the Atlantic
as well.)

The Swedish discovery had come in the wake of an
especially productive expedition to Mesoamerica in the winter of 1978.
My field assistant and I had finally "cracked" the formula which the
early town planners had used to lay out their cities, and we had
repeatedly confirmed its presence throughout the Yucatán Peninsula and
the highlands of Oaxaca. We had likewise worked out the astronomical
properties of the spectacular Maya capital city of Tikal, and by now
the final bits of evidence for how the calendar had diffused
throughout Mesoamerica were almost all in place. One element of
"static" in the whole picture was that we also had discovered nearly a
dozen more magnetic sculptures, this time in Guatemala, which were
probably even older than the turtle-head at Izapa. The latter find was
reported on the Science page of Time magazine, while the astronomical
matrix of Tikal and the evidence of calendrical diffusion were
published in a symposium report issued by the Center for
Archaeoastronomy.

In 1981 a more extensive journey to western South
America and Polynesia took my field assistant and me to such varied
sites as San Agustín in the jungles of Colombia, Cerro Sechín in the
desert of Peru, Tiahuanaco near the shores of Lake Titicaca in
Bolivia, and Easter Island. While we uncovered several intriguing bits
of evidence, subsequently described in a comprehensive paper dealing
with Mexico and Sweden as well, again the fact that no credible
antecedents for the calendars of Izapa were uncovered in any of these
possible "donor regions" simply reinforced the likelihood that the
calendars were the products of the native genius of Mesoamerica.

With the calendars' origins and diffusion now so
clearly established -- in my own mind at least -- I saw my further
research taking a somewhat different tack. By making Izapa the
centerpiece of my argument, I knew that even most of the "Olmequistas"
were wary of me. Half a century of their work had turned up so much
evidence of the Olmec presence in the Gulf coastal plain of Mexico
that for anyone to suggest that the "real" geographic center of
innovation had been instead on the Pacific coastal plain was totally
flying in the face of the "Olmequista" camp.

Many different geographic foci have been suggested as
the cradle of the Olmecs, with some lines of reasoning being based on
environmental evidence and others on the stylistic evolution of art
forms. For example, in his classic study from 1949 titled Mundo olmeca
(The 0lmec World), Ignacio Bernal identified the hearth of their
civilization as the "Olmec metropolitan area" -- that part of the Gulf
coastal plain lying to the south and east of the Tuxtla Mountains.
Michael Coe, writing in 1965, essentially agreed, arguing that the
core area of Olmec culture lay in the heartland of southern Veracruz
and western Tabasco, most probably at San Lorenzo because the earliest
radiocarbon dates stem from there. However, Coe conceded that the
original home of the Olmecs may have been in the Tuxtlas since this is
where most of their building stone came from and it was probably one
of the many volcanoes in that region which served as the inspiration
for the fluted-cone pyramid at La Venta. Of course, if such were the
case, their true origins might lie buried forever beneath deep layers
of lava and ash -- which would certainly account for no earlier
evidence ever having been found.

Alfonso Caso tended to agree, in part at least,
contending that the Olmec civilization, like those of the Near East,
was the product of the great alluvial valleys that one finds so
prominently in evidence on the Gulf coastal plain of Mexico. It was
their fertile soils, he argued, that made possible the food surpluses
that in turn gave rise to the great urban developments of the Olmecs.
Of course, Caso made no distinction between the environments through
which their respective rivers flowed, those in the Old World being
deserts and that in the New being a rainforest. To him, the
"hydraulic" parallel was close enough.

William Sanders disagreed, pointing out that all the
Old World civilizations were based on irrigation techniques developed
in arid lands; therefore, the urban origins of the Olmecs, if they
paralleled those of virtually every other known civilization -- and
there was no good reason to believe that they didn't! -- must have
been in the semiarid basins of the Mexican plateau. In short, it was
quite inconceivable to Sanders that the Olmecs should have been such
an exception to the "rule" that they could have developed the
necessary agricultural surpluses in a tropical rainforest environment,
when no other culture in the world appeared to have been able to do
so.

Roman Piña Chan agreed in part with Sanders, suggesting
the likelihood that, because of the relatively numerous Olmec finds
which had been encountered in and around the state of Morelos, this
area must have been the cradle of their civilization. Using much the
same line of argument but stressing a stylistic progression, Miguel
Covarrubias believed it was on the Pacific slopes of the states of
Oaxaca and especially Guerrero that the origins of the Olmecs should
be sought; it was in the latter areas, he said, that "[Olmec
culture's] most archaic forms appear." Charles Wicke essentially
seconded Covarrubias's motion, specifically zeroing in on the
Mixteca-Alta region of western Oaxaca where a particularly primitive
monument had been discovered at the village of San Martín Huamelulpan.
Edwin Ferdon used much the same rationale to argue for the primacy of
the Tehuantepec region, having discovered a fairly early
representative of Olmec sculpture at Tonalá, whereas S. W. Miles
wanted to push the Olmec heartland even farther south into the Pacific
coastal plain of Chiapas and Guatemala, likewise on the basis of
"archaic" sculptures.

At first glance it might seem an exaggeration to attach
so much importance to the sacred calendar. Yet, anyone familiar with
its role in the life of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica realizes that bound
up with the calendar are many if not all of the more sophisticated
aspects of the region's early intellectual life: the awareness of a
cyclicity in the movement of celestial bodies, the evolution of
mathematical skills by which they could manipulate the numbers derived
from those cycles, and the development of a system of hieroglyphics
for recording the results. Thus, if and when the calendar diffused
from Izapa to the Olmecs, the Maya, and the other peoples of the
region, with it must have come most of the trappings of civilization
-- astronomy, mathematics, writing, urban planning. So, too, should
there have been some transfer of material culture, witnessed in types
of pottery and styles of architecture. And certainly one of the most
reliable of trace elements in pinning down the diffusion of peoples is
language. If I could find evidence that cultural traits such as these
had paralleled the movement of the calendar, my hypothesis would be
immeasurably strengthened.

Accompanied by another student assistant in the spring
of 1983, 1 was off to some of the most remote mountain areas of
southern Mexico to visit remnants of a linguistic group who I
hypothesized were the original bearers of civilization in Mesoamerica.
Our results not only confirmed what earlier researchers had argued for
in terms of the interrelationships of the languages they spoke, but
they also provided a coherent spatial context by which to explain
their present scattered distribution. So confident was I of my
findings that I titled my resultant paper, published in 1985, "The
Origins of Civilization in Mesoamerica." (Concurrent and subsequent
studies by linguistic specialists have confirmed the linguistic
identity of the Olmecs, though my hypothesis for the present
geographic distribution of these languages has yet to win their
endorsement.)

Confident that I had at long last pulled together about
as much evidence as I could regarding the origins of civilization in
Mesoamerica, I decided to turn my attention to the situation which
existed in the waning days of pre-Columbian civilization. What, for
instance, had been the contribution of the peoples and cultures of the
region who were the last to fall into the embrace of the sacred
calendar -- peoples like the Nahuatl-speaking nomads from the northern
desert, the Toltecs and the Aztecs, and the Purépecha, or Tarascans,
who live in the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán? And how does
the explanation of one much-repeated Maya date at Copán now make it
possible for us to confirm positively the correlation of their
calendar with our own? In the pages which follow, these are some of
the themes I will explore as I chart the achievements of the
"Mesoamerican intellect."

(Return to Table of Contents) (Continue to Chapter 2)