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Edzná

In 1976, having moved from Middlebury College to Dartmouth College in the
middle of the academic year, I was prevented from returning to Mexico to
continue my field work during the winter dry season. However, I decided
instead to avail myself of Dartmouth's excellent computer facilities and
write a computer program which would not only allow me to "run back" both
(1) the 365-day Mesoamerican secular calendar and (2) the 260-day sacred
almanac to the dates of their beginnings but would also tell me (3) when
the Mayas had reformed their calendar by changing their "New Year's Day"
to July 26 and (4) when the ingenious device known as the "Long Count" had
been devised. (My book and my 1978 article in the Journal for the History
of Astronomy detail the parameters which I used in developing my program.)

I inserted four "flags" in the program to alert me when each of the
critical dates had been reached. Here I am concerned with only one of
these -- the most recent. My computer program revealed that the Maya
calendar reform most likely occurred in the year A.D. 48 and that
geographically it would have taken place at a site situated at latitude
19.5ş N. -- the latitude at which the zenithal sun passes overhead on July
26 -- the event and date which Bishop Landa specified as having served to
begin the Mayan New Year. Such a parallel of latitude neatly bisects the
Yucatán peninsula and thus would have served the Mayas well, but the only
ceremonial center located along this line was a place called Edzná. In the
archaeological literature available in 1976, Edzná was identified as a
"Late Classic" site -- in other words, its origins had been dated to
between A.D. 600 and A.D. 900.

Needless to say, I made no mention of Edzná in my journal article
described above. However, at the very time I was carrying out my computer
reconstruction of the Mesoamerican calendars, Prof. Ray Matheny of Brigham
Young University was initiating a thorough investigation of the site of
Edzná and two years later, by pure chance, our paths crossed at the
headquarters of the New World Archaeo- logical Foundation in San Cristóbal
de Las Casas. Almost apologetically I told him of my "find" of a calendar
reform which supposedly had taken place 600 years before Edzná had been
founded, but he quickly assured me that his excavations conclusively
proved that Edzná was in existence by 150 B.C. and that it in fact
represented the oldest major Maya city yet discovered! When I suggested to
him that I expected to find that Edzná was also a major Maya astronomical
center, he informed me that an astronomer he had already engaged had found
nothing of significance there, but he invited me to explore the site for
myself -- which I did within the week.

The "discoveries" which I made at Edzná in 1978 were as exciting as any
that I have made anywhere. The site itself lies on the edge of the largest
"aguada", or alluvial basin, in all of the Yucatán -- certainly the
premium agricultural location in that otherwise stony and water-deficient
peninsula. Its dominating structure is the five-story pyramid -- called
simply "Cinco Pisos" by the archaeologists -- seen above, visible across
the featureless plain for almost 50 km (30 mi.).

My first "discovery" was the recognition of a gnomon at the base of Cinco
Pisos so ingenious in design that it could calibrate the passage of the
zenithal sun at the Maya New Year with absolute precision. Second came the
recognition that the entire ceremonial center had exactly the same
orientation as Teotihuacán -- its contemporary 1000 km (600 miles) away on
the Mexican plateau -- in that it was oriented to the setting sun on
August 13th. And finally, from the top of Cinco Pisos I realized that the
lofty ruined pyramid which intersected the featureless northwestern
horizon did so precisely in line with the northernmost stillstand of the
moon, making it most likely the oldest lunar observatory in the New World!
Although Edzna had been denied a place in my 1978 article because of its
unseemly "date of origin", it became the theme of several of my subsequent
research papers and recently has been recognized by the Mexican government
as one of the key potential tourist attractions of the Yucatán.

From the base of Cinco Pisos, one looks across the plaza to a great mound
erected as an "artificial horizon". In the middle of the mound is a
"notch" through which one can sight from the doorway of the Cinco Pisos
courtyard to the top of a small pyramid beyond the mound. This three-point
sight-line marks the azimuth of 285.5ş, the sunset position on August 13.
The top of the ruined pyramid ("La Vieja") in the right-background
intersects the true horizon at an azimuth of 300ş, the northernmost
setting position of the moon.

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