Maya Calendar Origins: Monuments, Mythistory, and the Materialization of Time

291 Pages·2008·11.829 MB·English

by  Prudence M. Rice

Maya Calendar Origins
N
the william & bettye nowlin series
in Art, History, and Culture of the Western Hemisphere
MAYA
CALENDAR
ORIGINS
Monuments, Mythistory, and
the Materialization of Time
PRUDENCE M. RICE
Copyright © 2007by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2007
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The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of
ANSI/NISOZ39.48-1992(R1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rice, Prudence M.
Maya calendar origins : monuments, mythistory, and the materialization
of time / Prudence M. Rice. — 1st ed.
p. cm. — (William and Bettye Nowlin series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-292-71688-9(cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-292-71692-6
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Maya calendar. 2. Maya chronology. 3. Maya cosmology. I. Title.
f1435.3.c14r53 2007
529´.32978427—dc22
2007001064
Dedicated to my happy, helpful, quadripartite band of were-jaguar
wannabes: Poodie, Binz, Ted, and especially Harley
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Authority over the annual calendar . . . , or of other chronological instruments
like clock time, not only controls aspects of the everyday lives of persons but
also connects this level of control to a more comprehensive universe that entails
critical values and potencies in which governance is grounded. Controlling these
temporal media variously implies control over this more comprehensive order
and its definition, as well as over the capacity to mediate this wider order into
the fundamental social being. . . . Hence the importance of calendric and related
time shifts connected with sociopolitical changes is more than political in the
narrow pragmatic sense. It has to do with the construction of cultural governance
through reaching into the body time of persons and coordinating it with values
embedded in the “world time” of a wider constructed universe of power.
—Nancy Munn, “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay”
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables xi
Note on Orthography and Dates xiii
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xix
1 Introduction 1
Popol Vuh, a Maya Creation Myth 3
Time and Preclassic Mesoamerica 5
Chiefdoms and Cycles 8
The Early Maya and the Isthmian Region 9
2 In the Beginning: Early Mesoamerican Prehistory 12
Early Occupation: The Paleoindian or Lithic Stage 13
The Archaic Stage 15
The Archaic-to-Formative Transition 18
The Early Mesoamerican Tradition 22
Discussion 28
3 Mesoamerican Calendrics: Time and Its Recording 30
The 260-day Calendar 31
The 360- and 365-day Calendars 39
The Long Count and the May 44
Origins of the Mesoamerican Calendars 45
Recording Time 48
Discussion 56
4 Maya Calendar Developments in Broader Context 58
Originally Thirteen Months? 58
Beginnings and Endings 61
The Months and the Day Names: A Derivational Model 63
Calendrical Origins and the Popol Vuh 67
5 Middle and Late Preclassic: The Gulf Coast Olmec and Epi-Olmec 75
Architectural Patterns 77
Monuments, Iconography, and Themes 87
Discussion: Calendrical Implications 102
The Epi-Olmec 103
Discussion 106