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Chapter 12

The Long Journey: A Retrospective

The civilization that died on the 13th of August, 1521,
was the last in a long parade of Mesoamerican indigenous cultures.
Indeed, apart from that of the Incas in the highlands of the Andes,
the Aztec Empire represented the final flowering of native genius in
the Americas. Within a decade or two following the European arrival,
the toll taken by conquest, enslavement, and disease had all but
erased the hard-won achievements of the Mesoamerican peoples during
the past three millennia. Because so many of their written records had
the calendars as their focus, and these were so intimately interlaced
with their religion, the Spanish were especially assiduous in
consigning as many such books to the flames as they could find.

Ironically, it was precisely this interconnection between
religion on the one hand and astronomy, mathematics, hieroglyphics,
and architecture on the other that had stalled the forward progress of
intellectual development within Mesoamerica. Despite their use of such
sophisticated tools as the Long Count and the concept of zero, their
presumed discovery of magnetism and of the celestial pole, their
knowledge of the length of the Venusian cycle, their ability to
predict eclipses, and their success in having located both the Tropic
of Cancer and the parallel of latitude on which the sacred almanac was
born, the priestly elite of Mesoamerica never apparently probed beyond
the supernatural to find a rational explanation for, or a logical
cause-and-effect relationship between, the phenomena they observed.
For example, although the Mesoamericans recognized the planet Venus as
being both the "morning star" and the "evening star" -- whereas the
Greeks considered them two separate bodies, Hesperos and Vesperos --
the native American cultures found no other explanation for Venus and
its strange "behavior" than that it represented the god Quetzalcóatl
periodically visiting the underworld. Indeed, the Maya seem to have
attempted to "massage" the measures of its various phases into such a
structured pattern that, according to the calendar, it would always
make its heliacal appearance on its "birthday" -- the day 1 Ahau.
While this is but one illustration of their "bending the rules" or
"fudging the results," there seems to have been enough of this kind of
evidence of the Maya's employing the calendar to serve their religious
needs to prompt Thompson to conclude that they were more astrologers
than they were astronomers. In other words, their study of the heavens
was not motivated by the desire to acquire knowledge for knowledge's
sake, but rather to further an ideological agenda.

In the preceding chapters, I have attempted to demonstrate
how geography influenced the development of some of the key aspects of
the intellectual life of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Our focus has been
on the unique, interlocking pair of sacred and secular calendars which
were devised in this region and which ultimately became the very
hallmark of indigenous civilization on the North American continent.
Insofar as it has been possible, I have traced the diffusion of these
ingenious innovations from their birthplace on the southern margins of
Mesoamerica through both time and space to embrace the whole of the
region. Naturally, in a journey as encompassing in time and space as
this has been, it was only inevitable that there would be changes and
omissions, advances and retreats, triumphs and failures. Perhaps the
most remarkable fact of all is that the Mesoamerican calendars could
have touched the lives of so many people in so many places for so long
a time, given that most of them were preliterate and that their only
means of overland movement was by foot.

We have seen how a convergence of clues --astronomical,
historical, and geographical -- led to the identification of the
calendars' cradle in Izapa and how the association of time with space
was first recognized there in terms of a solsticial alignment. We
likewise traced the calendars' diffusion both southward along the
coastal plain of Guatemala as far as the western reaches of what today
is the country of El Salvador and also northwestward along the Pacific
shore of Chiapas into the Tehuantepec Gap. From the earliest Olmec
ceremonial center at San Lorenzo, we watched the tide of civilization
sweep through the Gulf coastal plain of Mexico, radiating toward the
north and west onto the Mexican plateau, toward the south and west
into the highlands of Oaxaca, and eastward into the Petén and Yucatán.

The initial wave of calendar adoption and city building
found its furthest limits in the moisture requirements of maize, and
there, on the very edge of the Chichimec world, gave rise to the
greatest urban agglomeration that the pre-Columbian Americas ever
produced. Indeed, it was under the aegis of Teotihuacán that the two
most "scientifically motivated" expeditions of the era were undertaken
-- one into the northern desert to find the Tropic of Cancer and one
into the southern jungles to locate the place "where time began."

From its "high water mark," or golden age, in the sixth
century A.D., Mesoamerican civilization began an inexorable decline --
precipit-ous on occasion, slow and faltering at other times. More than
anything, it was the Chichimecs of the north --the Nahuatl-speaking
nomads -- who were responsible for its collapse, for with their
advance we see the retreat of intellectualism back toward the south
and east. At the same time that the Toltecs were substituting warriors
for priests at the top of their social and political hierarchy and
institutionalizing increasingly innovative forms of human sacrifice as
part of the calendrical rituals they had "inherited" by virtue of
their conquest of Teotihuacán, the Maya were putting the finishing
touches on their centuries-long effort to predict eclipses and define
the cycle of Venus. Yet, within little more than a century they, too,
had been swept away -- no doubt by a combination of circumstances, but
among which military pressures from the uncivilized north must
certainly have played a substantial part. It may have been fitting
that the Toltecs were themselves overrun and put to flight by yet
another sweep of Nahuatl-speaking nomads out of the north, the Aztecs,
but in the process Mesoamerican civilization was set back even
further. Now, as militarism and war were elevated to instruments of
statecraft and human sacrifice reached the scale of mass murder, the
calendar was largely reduced to a timetable for execution and the
numerical hieroglyphs became mere tools for tribute extraction. With
the notable exception of persons like Nezahualcóyotl, whose
contributions to poetry and engineering made him probably the closest
thing to the Renaissance man in Aztec times, the intellectual apogee
of Mesoamerican civilization had already long since been reached and
passed before the Spanish arrived. Tragic as their fanatical siege of
book burning was, it simply marked the final chapter in a story which
the Aztecs themselves had undertaken for reasons of "historical
legitimacy" and which the Toltecs had, perhaps unwittingly, launched
when they put the priests of Teotihuacin to flight nearly a millennium
earlier.

Figure 58.

This map summarizes the diffusion of the Mesoamerican calendrical
system from its hearth in Soconusco by using isochrones of 300-400
years. Once through the Tehuantepec Gap, the calendars spread both
westward onto the Mexican plateau and eastward into the Maya region.
Though both dots and bars were initially used to record numerals
everywhere, on the Mexican plateau and southward into the Mixtec and
Zapotec country, Nahua (i.e., Toltec and later Aztec) influence
resulted in the abandonment of the practice of using a bar for "5" and
in the substitution of dots for all numerical notations.

SOCONUSCO: HEARTH OR BRIDGEHEAD?

Among the many questions which remain unanswered despite
our lengthy inquiry is at least one which goes back to the very
origins of the calendar and civilization itself. If, as we have
hypothesized, the region of Soconusco was indeed the cradle of these
developments within Mesoamerica, was it because these innovations
arose out of the response of local people to local environmental needs
or stimuli or did they simply represent the transmission onto the
North American continent of ideas born elsewhere? In other words, we
are confronting the classic dichotomy of "independent invention"
versus "diffusion": Was Soconusco a true hearth of innovative genius
in its own right, or was it merely a bridgehead where the calendars
first "came ashore" on the Middle American mainland from some other
birthplace overseas?

In our exposition up to now, we have tacitly assumed that
Soconusco was a "hearth" and not a "bridgehead," but is this
assumption justified? After all, no less a scientist than Alexander
von Humboldt -- one of the fathers of modern geography -- commented as
early as the beginning of the nineteenth century on the amazing
similarity between the "Tibetan" and "Tartar" calendars of the Old
World and the Aztec calendar of the New. He pointed out not only that
both calendars were based on cycles that combined numbers and animal
names, but also that there was a striking correspondence in the very
names of the animals that appeared in each of the calendars. He was
also impressed by the commonalities between the 28 "lunar mansions,"
or nakshatras, used by the Hindus and what he called the "Mexican
zodiac" (Humboldt, 1810). Subsequent writers have drawn numerous
parallels between the Chinese and Mesoamerican time-counts; several
have gone so far as to strongly suggest, if not openly state, that the
former was undoubtedly the forerunner of the latter.

Implicit in such claims and conjectures, of course, is
some form of transpacific contact. Indeed, if the dates we have
assigned to the origins of the Mesoamerican calendars are correct,
then such voyages would have to have been undertaken at least as early
as the fourteenth century B.C. -- a possibility to which almost no
reputable archaeologist or anthropologist is willing to subscribe. On
the other hand, as we have seen, there is bountiful evidence of early
and repeated seaborne contacts with South America through a long span
of pre-Columbian history, at least some of which are known to have
been with Soconusco as far back as the middle of the second millennium
before Christ. Is it conceivable that the calendar might have been one
of the innovations which accompanied the introduction of Ocós pottery,
for instance?

Mention of ceramics in the same breath as conjectures
regarding transpacific voyaging raises the spectre of a yet more
ominous debate for most archaeologists, however. Some of the earliest
known pottery to have been found in South America comes from the tiny
fishing port of Valdivia on the desert coast of Ecuador (ca. 3800-3300
B.C.), and because it is consummately made and ornately decorated, it
is obvious that it does not represent the bungling first attempts of
some indigenous potter. It definitely has the appearance of an
"import" with a long tradition of craftsmanship behind it. Moreover,
and perhaps most unsettling of all, its design motifs bear a strong
resemblance to those of Jornon pottery from southern Japan, whose
antecedents go back to the sixth millennium B.C. But for any
archaeologist to pose a geographic diffusion of the magnitude of a sea
voyage from Japan to Ecuador -- i.e., 8000 nautical miles -- and
especially in a time frame around 3500 B.C., would almost guarantee
his or her being drummed out of the fraternity at the very least and
perhaps committed to a mental institution at the very worst. Indeed,
any "foreign intervention" in the cultural evolution of the Americas
prior to the arrival of Columbus is considered by most anthropologists
to have been highly unlikely, if not totally impossible.

Ironically, at the very time when modern geography is
increasingly developing mathematical models and simulations to
replicate the processes of diffusion, current anthropological thinking
has virtually turned its back on it as an operating principle. Almost
no effort is spared to substitute some other explanation -- the gist
of which inevitably revolves around some form of "independent
invention" -- to take its place. (For example, some of the most
imaginative alternatives have been concocted to account for the spread
of agriculture, that is, the introduction of various types of crops
and livestock, across Europe -- without the movement of human beings!)
The idea of diffusion has become anathema, and anyone who attempts to
apply it risks being labeled "out-dated" or "obsolete" in his or her
research. In short, diffusion has become a "dirty word."

For the moment, we will put the "amazing coincidences"
which von Humboldt noted between Old and New World calendars aside and
concentrate instead on a possible South American origin. Although
there is a noticeable reluctance on the part of many archaeologists to
acknowledge even such linkages within the New World, the evidence is
so overwhelming in favor of an early and sustained contact between the
Andean countries of South America and western Mexico that there seems
little reason to question the point any farther. What remains to be
established is whether or not any real antecedents of the Mesoamerican
calendars can be traced to Colombia, Ecuador, or Peru prior to 1400
B.C.

Here the facts of geography are fully of as much
importance in helping us to reach a sound conclusion as are any
fragments of archaeological evidence. Like the Aztecs in Mesoamerica,
the Incas in South America represented the final manifestation of
indigenous civilization on their respective continents. This does not
mean that either of them marked the culmination of native American
achievement, because there is some reason to believe that the
Tiahuanaco culture in the Lake Titicaca basin may have surpassed the
Incas in intellectual creativity in the same way that the Olmecs had
so far outshown the Aztecs; thus, in both regions, civilization may
have reached its highest point long before its final chapter was
written.

The Andean region of South America is characterized by
three markedly different climatic aspects: First, on the east, in the
montaña, we find a region of selva, or rain forest. Along the eastern
slopes of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, the updrafts of warm moist air
are almost unceasing, but are obviously much more vigorous during the
warmer part of the day. The cloud forests of the montaña are
constantly dripping with moisture and in many areas the total annual
precipitation exceeds 5 m (200 in.). Second, in the high mountains of
the center, the sierra, we find a cool, semiarid climate whose most
striking vegetation association is the puna, or alpine tundra.
Precipitation is decidedly modest, seldom totaling more than about 750
mm (30 in.), and it likewise varies from a maximum in the high-sun
season (December, January, and February) to a minimum in the Andean
winter. Finally, bordering the Pacific coast over a distance of nearly
3000 km (1800 mi) is the Atacama Desert -- the driest desert in the
world. Cut off from the trade winds blowing across the Amazon basin
and up the eastern front of the Andes by lofty ranges higher than 6000
m (22,000 ft) in elevation, the Pacific slope of South America is
likewise paralleled by the intensely cold Humboldt, or Peru, Current.
This combination of circumstances -- a rain-shadow location
exacerbated by offshore water so cold that almost no moisture is
evaporated into the air above it -- makes it virtually impossible for
precipitation to occur. As a result, a place like Lima, the capital of
Peru, a scant 20 km (12 mi) from the coast, receives an average of 25
mm. (1 in.) of rain a year. To be sure, an occasional surge of Pacific
air may drift the low-hanging fog onto the coastal sand dunes long
enough to give rise to a brief and spectacular flowering of small
plants whose seeds have lain dormant for perhaps a decade or more, but
such garuas are not frequent. Perhaps somewhat more frequent but
certainly more devastating are the periodic invasions of warm surface
waters pushed into the coasts of Ecuador and Peru by the El Niño
("Christ Child") current, so named because it usually puts in its
appearance around Christmas. When these "backwashes" occur, which is
about every 7-8 years, the plankton in the cold fresh water of the
Peru Current die back as the El Niño spreads a blanket of warm, saline
waters over the sea surface. Cut off from their food supply, the fish
move to deeper levels of the ocean or retreat southward with the
colder water. And as the fish disappear, the hordes of seabirds that
depend on them for food and that colonize the coastal cliffs die back,
and in turn, the deposits of their excrement (guano) -- a much prized
fertilizer -- also grow thin. Finally, culminating this ecological
disaster are the rain storms which are spawned by the high evaporation
of the now-warm coastal waters. During an El Niño episode, as much
rain can fall in the Atacama during a single storm as over an average
20-year period. Indeed, in the one month of October 1967 as much rain
fell at a station in northern Chile as the place would normally have
received in the entire time since the Spanish conquest!

Thus, each of the Andean regions has its distinctive
climatic hallmark. In the Amazon basin, it is almost always raining.
In the Atacama, it almost never rains. And in the mountains between
them it seldom rains much, but it tends to rain a little more in
"summer" than in "winter."

The point to be made here is that only the latter region,
the sierra, has an environment which would have seriously motivated
anyone to develop a calendar. Indeed, elsewhere there would really
have been no necessity for one. In the montaña there is sufficient
warmth and moisture at all times of the year to grow virtually any
crop imaginable. There is, in fact, good evidence that the people in
southern Colombia, for example, around San Agustín, were already
growing coca -- possibly for export to Mesoamerica -- as early as 500
B.C. Similarly, Chavín, the site of the classic Andean counterpart to
the Olmec civilization, also on the east side of the Andes, was
probably involved in the coca trade even 500 years earlier. In neither
place was a means of timekeeping a prerequisite to agricultural
success.

In the Atacama Desert, on the other hand, agriculture was
impossible everywhere but in the 40-odd little exotic river valleys
that cut their way down from the Andes to the shore of the Pacific.
Here, amidst an otherwise waterless desert of sand and rock, the
presence of these short, violent streams flowing out of the mountains
presented the only opportunity for secure and continuing human
settlement along the entire coast of Peru. To be sure, the coastal
waters themselves could be counted on for some measure of subsistence,
thanks both to the rich schools of fish and the aquatic birds that
preyed on them -- at least so long as El Niño did not put in an
appearance. Indeed, these maritime resources were most likely the
magnet that drew the early Ecuadorians and Peruvians out to sea and
that gradually encouraged the coastal inhabitants to school themselves
in the arts of raft building and navigation, and ultimately of
exploration. But it was the narrow ribbons of green, irrigated
cropland along the exotic rivers that made agriculture and ultimately
town building possible. Although the cold offshore current keeps
temperatures along coastal Peru relatively cool for being so near to
the equator, there is more than adequate warmth for growing a variety
of both tropical and subtropical crops. In the lowland oases these
include maize, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, and cotton, whereas
in the mountains a greater dependence was placed on potatoes and
quinoa, a hardy grain. Domesticated animals included the guinea pig in
the coastal areas and the llama, alpaca, and vicuña at higher
elevations.

From about 2300 B.C. onward -- beginning with the Chavín
culture at places like Cerro Sechín and continuing with such cultures
as the Mochica, Nazca, and ultimately the Inca -- an advanced
civilization with imposing pyramids, planned cities, and elaborate
irrigation works flourished in the coastal oases of Peru and in the
highlands surrounding Lake Titicaca. As early as eight or nine
centuries before Christ, Andean artisans had developed metalworking
and not long afterward they were producing exquisite double-weave
textiles. There is no question but that the South American "cultural
hearth" had a very impressive lead over Mesoamerica in material goods,
technology, and social organization for possibly as long as a
millennium.

Such evidence as there is of contact between the South
American "hearth" and Mesoamerica seems to have been traced more to
Ecuador, and to a lesser degree, Colombia, than to Peru. How might
this be explained? Once again, geography may hold the key. The total
absence of suitable building materials for waterborne craft along the
desert coast of Peru largely rules out the development of balsa rafts
or reed boats in that area. Only along the estuary of the Guayas River
in Ecuador and from northern Ecuador into Colombia do tropical forests
come down to the Pacific shore. The totora reed, on the other hand,
grows almost exclusively in freshwater lakes such as Titicaca.

However, Peru's lack of raw materials for raft or boat
building was not its only impediment to contact with Mesoamerica; it
also had the Humboldt Current to contend with. As Thor Heyerdahl's
Kon-Tiki expedition vividly illustrated, any vessel swept along in
this current's broad and forceful flow would be drifted far out into
the Pacific, for it turns westward into the ocean just to the south of
the equator. Its cold waters continue to depress temperatures and
discourage the formation of rain clouds out past the Galápagos Islands
and well beyond the Marquesas. Any early navigator caught in this
giant vortex of water would find that, once out of sight of the South
American coast, his plight would worsen, because soon he would find
himself pushed along by the trade winds as well. With both current and
easterly winds against him, there would be little chance of his seeing
the American mainland again.

To the north of Ecuador's westernmost promontory, both the
ocean currents and the weather conditions are very different. The warm
waters of the main branch of the Equatorial Countercurrent sweep
northward along the coast of Colombia into the Gulf of Panama, and for
part of the year the flow is strong enough to reach even as far as
Soconusco and the south coast of Mexico. Thus, it woudn't have taken
much knowledge of navigation to drift northward along the coast of
Central America in the summer months and to return again when the
California Current intensifies its southward flow during the winter
months. That Pacific Mesoamerica, then, should have had its earliest
and most frequent contacts with Ecuador and Colombia, rather than
Peru, is very largely a matter of the geography of timber resources
and ocean currents. That both Ecuador and Colombia were themselves
somewhat peripheral to the principal Andean cultural hearth in no way
detracts from their importance as potential springboards of diffusion
because even though they may have developed somewhat later than the
Peruvian core area, they were still in close enough geographic
proximity to the "center" to have been much more advanced than
Mesoamerica.

We have already mentioned how the South American cultural
hearth was responsible for the introduction of such items and ideas as
ceramics, shaft tombs, and metallurgy into Mesoamerica and of human
migrants like the Purépecha as well. On the other hand, we have also
demonstrated that the climatic environments of the Andean region were
such that the early civilizations which developed there had only the
most rudimentary interest in or need for a calendar or timekeeping
system. The Incas, for example, had a self-correcting calendar which
began on the summer solstice (in the southern hemisphere, December
22). For this purpose, they had constructed four towers on the horizon
above Cuzco to mark both the rising and setting positions of the sun
on that date and on the winter solstice (June 22). They divided the
intervals between the solstices into two periods of six 30-day months,
allocating the remaining 5 days of the solar year to solsticial
celebrations at each end of the annual cycle. Although they probably
used certain key asterisms like the Pleiades and the Southern Cross as
seasonal "mileposts" of the solar year, the Andean peoples do not
appear to have been intellectually concerned with matters such as the
eclipse cycle or the phases of Venus in the same way that the
Mesoamerican cultures were. Impressive though their achievements in
engineering, social organization, and statecraft may have been, the
fact that they were preliterate societies and had not progressed
beyond keeping numerical tallies on other than knotted, colored
strings (called quipus) severely limited the development of the kind
of mathematical sophistication which the Long Count had engendered.
For all the Andean region's many cultural contributions to
Mesoamerica, the calendar certainly was not among them. 

THE CALENDARS OF ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST

With South America safely dismissed as a possible source
of inspiration for the Mesoamerican calendars, we can now turn our
attention westward across the Pacific to Asia to see whether their
antecedents might be found there instead. For the moment we will lay
aside all questions regarding transpacific diffusion and concentrate
on (1) what kind of calendars existed on the peripheries of Asia and
(2) when they had come into being. Only if they shared enough common
traits to have been conceivable prototypes of the Mesoamerican models
and had been developed before the middle of the fourteenth century
B.C. would it even be germane to broach the subject of how they got
from "there" to "here."

Lying on the western edge of the Pacific rim, China is
known to have had "an embryonic form of a lunisolar calendar" as far
back as the fourteenth century B.C. (Xi Zezong, 1987, 34). It differed
from that of Babylon and Greece by (a) fixing the beginning of a month
at the moment when the sun and the moon are at the same longitude
(shuo), (b) fixing the beginning of the year at the winter solstice,
and (c) dividing the year into 24 periods -- 12 jie and 12 qi. Twenty
of the latter had names connected with the seasons, showing that the
calendar was primarily designed for agricultural purposes (35). In
addition to shuo and jie, and qi the next basic element of the Chinese
calendar was the "run" -- an

intercalary month used to calibrate the lunar and solar counts.
Because the moon cannot be seen at the moment when the sun and the
moon are at the same longitude (unless there is a solar eclipse), the
"observation and calculation of eclipses became an inseparable part of
Chinese calendar-making" (35). Beyond serving as an agricultural
almanac, the Chinese calendar played an important role in statecraft,
because astronomers were used by the emperor "to observe the heavens
so as to investigate the change in human affairs on the earth" (34).
Through the observation of celestial phenomena they were expected to
divine such events as victory or defeat in a war, the rise and fall of
a nation, the success or failure of the year's crop, and the actions
of key members of the emperor's court.

For all of the many similarities that von Humboldt (and
subsequently, others) claim to have discovered in the names of the
Aztec days, months, and lunar mansions and those of their "Tibetan" or
"Tartar" counterparts, the intrinsic character of the Chinese calendar
was so different from that in Mesoamerica that it seems very unlikely
that the one could have served as the model for the other. As we have
seen, even though the Olmecs may have been recording eclipses by the
time of the birth of Christ, their successors, the Maya, seem not to
have discovered a surefire way of predicting them until as late as the
eighth century, whereas calculating eclipses had been an integral
mechanism of fixing the Chinese calendar from the very outset.
Moreover, the Chinese system of using a duodecimal system for dividing
their years had no counterpart in Mesoamerica, nor did the use of an
intercalary month between their lunar and solar counts. And finally,
whereas Xi Zezong mentions the establishment of an astronomical
observatory in China as early as 2000 B.C. (38), he lays claim to only
an "embryonic form of calendar" at the very time that the two
Mesoamerican counts were coming into existence. Thus, a Chinese origin
is all but ruled out for temporal reasons alone.

Turning yet farther westward, let us look to the Indian
subcontinent next to see what that region's earliest astronomers had
produced in the way of a calendar. Already during the so-called Vedic
period (beginning with the arrival of the Indo-Aryan peoples from
Central Asia, ca. 2000 B.C.), the sun had been identified as the "sole
lightgiver of the universe," the moon was known to have shown by
reflected sunlight, the five larger planets had been observed and
named, and the celestial path of the sun and moon (the zodiac) had
been divided into 27 or 28 asterisms called nakshatras, or "mansions
of heaven" (Shukla, 1987, 9). The day was reckoned from sunrise to
sunrise and the variability of its length was known. Six days formed a
"week," five "weeks" constituted a month, and 12 months made up a year
(10). The latter was composed of 366 days and was measured from one
winter solstice to another. It was likewise divided into six seasons,
each composed of two months, or 61 days. Twelve lunar months
constituted a lunar year, and in order to keep the lunar and solar
years in harmony, intercalary months were inserted at regular
intervals (11).

Despite the antiquity of the Vedic calendars of the Indian
subcontinent, it should be clear from the brief outline of their
structure given above that they differed substantially from the
Mesoamerican time counts. Indeed, it is probably safe to say that the
only similarities which the two calendrical systems had with one
another were those which von Humboldt himself pointed out -- i.e.,
some of the names of the animals used to identify the "mansions of
heaven." That two early peoples, both inhabiting tropical
environments, but in widely separated parts of the world, should "see"
the same kinds of "animals" mirrored in the patterns of the stars is
not too surprising. However, in view of all the critical differences
between the two calendrical systems, this similarity is far too
fragile a piece of "evidence" on which to base a claim for Hindu
patrimony. Moreover, the "earliest work which exclusively deals with
Vedic astronomy is the Vedanga-jyautisa," and although its date is
controversial, the situation it describes can best be correlated
either with 1150 B.C. or with 1370 B.C. (Shukla, 1987, 13). Thus, like
that of China, the calendar of the Indian subcontinent was only coming
into existence at the same time as our "New World Hipparchus" was at
work in Soconusco, or perhaps even a couple of centuries later. Again,
the very timing of its development rules it out as a model for the
Mesoamerican calendar.

The only potential calendrical "donors" still remaining
are Mesopotamia and Egypt, both of which well predate the beginnings
of Mesoamerican calendrical experimentation. Although no objection can
be raised on temporal grounds, the spatial relationship now becomes
increasingly dubious. Diffusion from the Middle East to Soconusco
would have involved vaulting not only the entire Pacific Ocean, but
the Indian Ocean as well -- and with no evidence of any intermediate
stops underway, apart from those in India and China already discussed.
Moreover, the very character of the Middle Eastern time-counts, based
as they were on a sexagesimal system, is completely at odds with the
Mesoamerican calendar. That they were the antecedents of the Indian
and Chinese calendars, and likewise of the Greek and Roman, seems very
likely, but surely not of those of the New World.

We can, therefore, with all good conscience hail our "New
World Hipparchus" as a creative genius in his own right, not beholden
to the ideas or ideology of any other people or region in the world.
Indeed, in the time frame in which he lived and worked, he was as much
a pioneer as the Chinese and Vedic astronomers who were at the same
juncture of history, half a world away, developing their own
distinctive calendrical systems -- and at least a dozen centuries
ahead of the great Greek astronomer to whom we are likening him.
Soconusco may well have served as a bridgehead into Mesoamerica for a
variety of South American cultural traits, but there seems little
doubt that it constituted the very "hearth," or cradle, of the
intellectual life of indigenous North America. The unique 260-day
sacred almanac is the product of a convergence of time and space that
may be traced directly to Izapa. All that we know of its creator was
that he spoke the Zoque language, lived in the middle of the
fourteenth century before Christ, and was intent on explaining the
rhythms of the heavens. Never could he have imagined that the quest
for understanding which he launched would set the stage for a
calendar, a religion, and a civilization that would eventually become
the very hallmarks of the cultural region which we know today as
Mesoamerica, nor that they would touch the lives of so many people
through such an immense span of time. It is perhaps only fitting that
in the mountain fastnesses behind Izapa the 260-day count which he
initiated continues to be tallied on wooden boards with sticks of
charcoal to this very day.

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