One of the diagnostics of classic
Maya culture was its system of permutating calendars. The ancient Maya seem to
have been fascinating, even obsessed, with recurring cycles of time, some of
them ceremonial in origin, having no apparent correspondence to anything in
nature; some recording such natural phenomena as the solar year, lunations,
eclipses, and other regularities of heavenly bodies as viewed from earth. . . .
One of these cycles as the Sacred Round (tzolkin) of 260 days, consisting of
two recurring cycles of different length, the first being of 13 days, recorded
as numbers, and the second being of 20 days, recorded as names. A second cycle
was the solar year or, more properly, the “vague year” of 365 days, which was divided
into 18 divisions of 20 days each (popularly referred to today as “months”)
plus a 5-day appendix at the end of the year, this last considered a dangerous
and unlucky period. The completion of these two cycles, the Sacred Round and
the Vague Year, coincided every 52 vague years (18,980 days). This larger cycle
is called the “Calendar Round.” Carved monuments (stellate) were frequently
erected at Calendar Round and other intervals. (Robert Wauchope, “Southern Mesoamerica,” in Prehistoric
Man in the New World, ed. Jesse D. Jennings and Edward Norbeck [Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1964], 344)
