Maya Long Count Calendar Linked to European One: Doomsday Count Gets a Makeover

A famous Mayan calendar, known as the Maya Long Count, may have more in common with the modern European calendar than we once thought. Researchers have revealed that the Mayan calendar has been empirically calibrated to the modern one.

The Long Count calendar was created by the Maya hundreds of years ago and fell into disuse before European contact in the Maya area. It counts days from a mythological starting point--the origin of days. The date from the calendar itself is created from five different components that combine a multiplier times differing amounts of days separated in standard notation by dots. This calendar is also the same one associated with the "doomsday" date in 2012. That said, it's more likely that the Maya viewed this "doomsday" as a rebirth rather than as an end of days.

So why bother aligning the calendars? Archaeologists are interested in understand when things happened in the Maya world relative to historic events. This would allow researchers to better correlate important moments among the Maya with other sources of environmental, climate and archaeological data.

In order to tie the calendars together, the researchers used samples from an elaborately carved wooden lintel from a temple in the ancient Maya city of Tikal. Then they measured tree growth by tracking annual changes in calcium uptake by the trees. After, they used the annually fluctuating calcium concentrations evident in the incremental growth of the trees in order to determine the true time distance between each sample. This allowed them to fit the four radiocarbon dates to the wiggles in the calibration curve. This provided a more accurate age for linking the Maya and Long Count dates to the European calendars.

Using these new measurements, the researchers found that the calendar mirrored the most popular method in use, the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson (GMT) correlation. This method was first put forth by Joseph Goodman in 1905 and was then modified by others over time.

Now, events recorded in various Maya locations "can now be harmonized with greater assurance to other environmental, climatic and archaeological datasets from this and adjacent regions," write the researchers. The new findings could allow archaeologists better understand Mayan history.

The findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.