The land that today is known as Mexico first felt the
footsteps of mankind something over twenty thousand years ago.
Crossing over the Bering land-bridge which linked northeastern
Siberia with Alaska during the depths of the last glacial
age—probably beginning about 30,000 B.C.—hardy hunters
pursued game animals up along the ice-free corridor of the Yukon
valley and down the eastern front of the Rockies into the broad
expanses of the tundra-covered Great Plains and western
plateaus. For their
livelihood they depended upon a diverse fauna of reindeer, bear,
giant sloths, horses, camels, and woolly mammoths, many species of
which they eventually hunted to extinction. Indeed, one of the
earliest evidences of humankind in Mexico comes from the marshy
shores of the very lake in whose midst the Aztec capital of
Tenochtitlán would arise many millennia
later. This was the discovery of the skeletal remains of
an individual who first was identified as “Tepexpan man”,
although more recent examination has disclosed that “he”
was in reality a woman. In what appears to have been a tragic
misadventure, this Tepexpan damsel was apparently crushed beneath the
feet of a raging mastodon that was in turn being killed by a party of
spear-throwing hunters some time around 11,000
B.C.
The farther south that the hunting parties trekked, the
warmer the climate grew and the richer and more abundant the plant
life became. In an environment as topographically diverse and
as geologically varied as that of Mexico, they encountered a myriad
of local ecologies combining a wide spectrum of elevations,
exposures, soil types and climates that were mirrored in a similarly
broad range in floras and faunas. As they advanced over the lofty
plateaus of the Meseta, the wildly folded and faulted sedimentary
ridges of the Sierra Madre Oriental lay to their east, the great
basaltic outpourings of the Sierra Madre Occidental formed their
western horizon, and ahead of them lay the spectacular row of
snow-covered cones which formed the Transverse Volcanic Axis, many of
whose peaks reach heights well over 5000 m (16,500 ft) in elevation.
Farther yet to the south they encountered the rugged granite-cored
massifs of the Sierra Madre del Sur bordering the Pacific, the vast
alluvial lowlands of the Gulf coastal plain laced by immense
meandering rivers, the pock-marked limestone platform of the
Yucatán peninsula jutting out to the northeast, and the
jumbled mountains of Chiapas where both limestones and granites
collided and the volcanic backbone of Central America took its
beginning.
As time went on and the hunters pressed ever southward,
their diet increasingly came to embrace edible plants as well. They
became in effect “gatherers” or “collectors”,
living off of whatever roots, berries, and shoots they could find in
addition to whatever wild life they could kill. But, even at this
early stage in their economic evolution they could scarcely fail to
recognize that “all places were not created equal”, for
the bounties of nature were in no way uniformly distributed.
The human settlement of the New World continued through isthmian Central America into the burgeoning expanse of mainland South America, ending only about 7000 B.C. as the most intrepid hunters and gatherers reached “land’s end” in the southern extremities of Patagonia and adjacent Tierra del Fuego. This was a process that had covered not only 30,000 km (20,000 miles) of space but also one that had also consumed 20,000 years, or 700 generations, of time. And during that lengthy interval the climate had warmed dramatically, ocean levels had risen noticeably, and the distribution of vegetative zones had come closer to approximating those that we recognize today.
About the time that the first humans reached the farthest
outposts of South America, their relatives who had remained behind in
the Amazon basin, in the foothills of the central Andes, and in the
mountains of southern Mexico and Guatemala had begun experimenting
with modifying the environments of certain of the food plants they
had come to favor. Initially, these “modifications”
involved little more than plucking away competing, unwanted
vegetation or supplying water to a desired plant in time of drought.
But, it gradually embraced the practice of consciously selecting and
planting seeds in areas that had been specially prepared to receive
them. From such humble
origins as these evolved the process of plant domestication that we
term “agriculture”, although because of the initial
garden-like scale on which it was carried out it might more
accurately have been termed
“horticulture”. Here in the Americas the process could no more be
called a “revolution” than it could in the Old World;
rather, it was a painfully slow evolution which saw the proportion of
domesticated plant food in the people’s diets increase from
around 10 percent about 5000 B.C. to just over 35 percent about 1500
B.C. The plants
themselves, to be sure, were very different in the two areas. Among
the more important crops which were being cultivated in the southern
Mexico “hearth” at the dawn of agriculture were squashes,
chile peppers, avocados, beans, and amaranth, with maize making its
debut as a cultigen sometime around 3000
B.C.
Although maize was eventually to become the premier
foodstuff of aboriginal America, its early prospects were singularly
unimpressive. Beginning as a wild form of grass whose cob was no
bigger than a thumbnail, it appears to have been native to both the
highlands of southern Mexico and Guatemala and the west coast of
South America in Peru and Ecuador. Probably sometime before 2000
B.C.—thanks to the human agency of trade—the primitive
domesticate from Mexico was crossed with its counterpart in South
America. The result was a genetically improved form of corn that was
crossed again with an Andean grass known as tripsacum. This second
crossing produced a much altered and enlarged ear of corn which, when
traded back to Mexico, crossed a third time with a wild grass in the
southern highlands known as teosinte. This union led to a further
explosive increase in size and generated the wide spectrum of maize
types found within this region today. These, in turn, provided the
genetic stock from which the modern hybrids familiar in the North
American Corn Belt were derived.
Few developments in human economic evolution have had so
pronounced a geographic significance as the beginnings of
agriculture. Unlike “collecting”, which could be
practiced with varying degrees of success in virtually all regions of
the world, agriculture was possible in some areas but not in others.
Naturally, the specific parameters of such a plant as maize were
certainly not understood at the outset, but by trial and error
would-be farmers discovered that there were spatial limits to where
they could grow their crops of choice. Throughout most of southern
Mexico, adequate warmth was scarcely a concern, although once an
elevation above 2800 m (9000 ft) was passed, it was clearly too cold
for the plant to thrive.
While local differences in drainage, exposure, and soil
productivity no doubt were observed as well, they were probably not
identified as factors of consequence for some time to
come.
In the American tropics, the most important limiting factor
to maize cultivation was definitely the amount and timing of the
moisture supply. Over most of the south and east of Mexico, the trade
winds bring in a rather steady flow of precipitation throughout the
year, and in these areas farming societies developed early and
prospered. By contrast, over the northern and western plateau region,
most of which lies in the rain-shadow of the mountain barrier of the
Sierra Madre Oriental, precipitation is largely restricted to the
summer inflow of monsoonal winds off of the Pacific. Because these
winds become less strong and dependable the farther they move from
the ocean, the more meager and sporadic was the moisture they
yielded, so all too soon the limit of maize cultivation was
reached. Indeed, it was
this climatic boundary that effectively set the northern limit of the
region we have come to know as Mesoamerica—that part of the
North American continent which was the home of its high native
cultures—for beyond it lay a vast expanse of semi-desert where
only a nomadic form of collecting was possible.
The shift to an agricultural economy in those geographic
areas of the Americas where such a transition was possible was also
accompanied by a change in the spatial patterns of behavior of the
peoples involved. Whereas a hunting-and-gathering society was almost
of necessity a nomadic one, with its members following the migrations
of game or the seasonal variations in the fruiting of plants, a
farming society—at least one based on such higher-order plants
as maize, beans, and squash—tended to become more
geographically fixed. The investment of time and labor in clearing
land, planting seeds, weeding, watering, fertilizing, and ultimately
harvesting the mature crop meant that agricultural peoples became
more settled in place. Moreover, because farming entailed an active
“partnership” in the production of food, rather than just
a passive collection of whatever bounty nature provided locally, the
food supply usually became not only more secure and dependable but
also capable of supporting larger numbers of people. Population
densities began to increase and, depending on the land use patterns
that developed, more and more people tended to live together in small
village-like settlements. This inevitably resulted in greater social
interaction, with all the positive and negative consequences that
such contact brings in its wake.
Where agriculture was practiced under especially favorable
conditions—and usually such geographic areas were discovered by
accident rather than by conscious design—it was even possible
to produce more food than the local inhabitants actually needed at
any given time. The significance of being able to produce surplus
food can scarcely be overemphasized, for by releasing some workers
from the day-to-day chores of tilling the fields, it permitted a
diversification and specialization of labor that had never before
been possible. In the Old World, such specially favored areas of food
production had been found in the so-called exotic river valleys of
the Near East, such as the Tigris and Euphrates, as early as 4500
B.C.; in the Nile Valley of Egypt by 4000 B.C.; in the Indus valley
of Pakistan by 3500 B.C.; in the valleys of the Amu and Syr Darya in
Central Asia by 3000 B.C.; and in the Wei river valley of north China
by 2500 B.C. In every instance a desert climate with cloudless skies,
twelve hours of daily sunshine, the absence of frost, little or no
vegetation cover to clear, and rich alluvial soils coincided with a
continuous supply of water from the adjacent river—true
“Gardens of Eden” in which only the totally lazy and
indifferent could have failed to enjoy the blessings of plenty.
Indeed, each of these exotic river valleys was either the cradle of a
civilization in its own right or, at least, the beneficiary of a
diffusion which first began in Mesopotamia and was later emulated
elsewhere under remarkably similar environmental conditions.
In the New World there is good evidence that the model of
“hydraulic” civilizations described above was first
replicated in the Atacama Desert of Peru where about 40 short exotic
rivers cut their way from the Andes to the Pacific. However, in the
region that we have called Mesoamerica, no such exotic river valley
environment exists, though a somewhat similar lacustrine setting
eventually gave rise to the region’s largest metropolis,
Teotihuacán, and later to its most sizable heir, the Aztec
capital of Tenochtitlán. Nevertheless, in the latter region,
archaeologists are now agreed that the oldest, or
“mother,” culture of the entire region is that of the
misnamed “Olmecs,” but who these people really were and
where they came from are still matters of some dispute.
Increasingly, however, the evidence seems to be pointing to
the region known as Soconusco, which lies in the Pacific piedmont of
southernmost Mexico and the adjacent area of Guatemala. It is to this
region that many of the earliest hallmarks characteristic of a more
advanced indigenous society have been traced, among them a
hierarchical political structure; an urban way of life; monumental
architecture, a distinctive feature of which was a ritual ball-court;
a highly developed religious pantheon; a sophisticated calendrical
system coupled with a knowledge of astronomy and mathematics; and the
use of a hieroglyphic form of
writing. Thus, it is
more than likely that the “Olmecs” were in reality the
Zoque, a people who inhabited the region of Soconusco at this
critical juncture in history—indeed, it may be that the very
name of the region itself incorporates evidence of the Zoque
presence. (Ironically, “Soconusco” is often translated as
“cactus fruit”, a term that seems strangely out of
context in a region whose predominant vegetation is rain forest.)
Why Soconusco should have become the cultural
“hearth” of civilization in Mesoamerica can probably be
explained by the fact that its fortuitous natural endowment had
favored the production of a surplus of food even before farming had
become a viable option. Backed by the highest volcanoes in all of
Central America, Soconusco ranges in climate from tropical
super-humid to sub-polar and its native vegetation varies from rain
forest to alpine tundra, or páramo. Its brackish
mangrove-laced lagoons have a richly diversified fauna of marine life
that includes fish, shrimp, lobster, mussels, turtles, and aquatic
birds, while roaming through the foothills are deer, tapir, and
peccary. Even at a hunting-and-gathering level of subsistence it is
likely that little more than 10 to 15 man-days per month were
required to feed a relatively dense sedentary
population.
When agriculture did begin, the first crop that seems to
have been cultivated was manioc, or cassava. A root grown from a
shoot, it could be literally be stuck into the ground at any season
and harvested whenever a hunter, fisher, or fowler came home
empty-handed. Shredded on obsidian-studded boards and pounded into a
paste, it was leached of its poisonous juices before being shaped
into large tortillas and fried. Although cassava served well to still
one’s pangs of hunger, it had neither the nutritive value nor
taste of maize, so when the latter crop was introduced about 1500
B.C., it quickly became the preferred staple of the people’s
diet. Indeed, it was probably here in Soconusco that this
much-hybridized plant first established its “bridge-head”
on the North American mainland following its arrival from coastal
South America. It would also appear that a distinctive style of
ceramics may have accompanied its introduction, for a type of pottery
found at Ocós on the coast of Soconusco and dating from the
same time period clearly indicates a tie to
Ecuador. Indeed, sea
borne contacts between South America and Mexico may well have been
commonplace by at least 2000 B.C., for numerous artifacts and
cultural traits tracing to Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru have been
discovered along the Pacific coast of Mexico as far north as the
states of Colima, Jalisco, and Nayarit. Without a doubt, Soconusco
played an active part in these exchanges as well, for it was endowed
with a variety of commodities that gave it a special prominence in
trade, including cacao, quetzal feathers, and
rubber.
The arrival of maize was, to be sure, a major event in its
own right. But unlike manioc, maize could not simply be “stuck
in the ground” or harvested at any time it suited the farmer.
Grown from seed, maize had to be planted according to a timetable
that corresponded closely to the arrival of the monsoon rains. Sown
too early, the seed would dry out and die before the rains came. Sown
too late, the seed would be washed away by the intense downpours
before it could take root.
It is for this reason, therefore, that the first
experimentation with a calendar appears to have begun in the
Soconusco region sometime shortly after the arrival of maize, i.e.,
about the middle of the 14th century
B.C.
Interestingly, the first attempt to calibrate the cycle of
the seasons was predicated on the interval between zenithal passages
of the sun over Soconusco. From the time that the
noon-day sun passed over the region on its annual
‘migration’ southward—an event which occurs on
August 13 -- until it once more passed overhead on its return
northward—on April 30-- a total of 260 days were counted, each
of them being assigned a number ranging from 1 to 13 and a name in a
sequence of 20. Of course, the next zenithal passage of the sun
(again on August 13) took place after an interval of only 105 days,
so it was quickly realized that such events did not recur on days
with the same numbers and names. Furthermore, whereas calibrating the
moment of the sun’s zenithal passage was simple enough (because
any upright pillar or post could be used to define the absence of its
shadow at noon), there was no easy way to indicate that day in
advance. As a result, the Zoque priest who devised the count found
that he could not identify the day of the sun’s zenithal
passage until after it
had happened and then only by pinning down the sun’s position
against a more precise “marker” than the zenith. In
effect, this meant that not until the sun was setting on the
horizon—a point that he could define with an artifact of his
own devising, whether it be a simple stela, a structure, or an
alignment of some kind—would he have a means of knowing when
his count had been completed. Thus, as a result of a lack of
knowledge regarding angles as well as of instruments to record them,
this first Mesoamerican venture into astronomy laid the ground-work
for what was to become a “horizon based” system of
observation, for other than the zenith, there were no
“fixed” points in the
heavens. A further
consequence of having to record the day of the sun’s zenithal
passage “after the fact” was that it established a very
distinctive Mesoamerican mind-set when it came to measuring time: to
wit, a day hadn’t really existed until it was over. Only then
could the events of that day be firmly identified as having taken
place on that day. Of course, the real problem with utilizing the
zenithal passages of the sun to calibrate time—original and
innovative as the notion was—was that it didn’t really
predict the advent of the monsoon rains with sufficient accuracy to
help the farmers plant their corn. Nonetheless, this novel 260-day
count took so strong a hold on the people’s imaginations and
lives that it was adopted as a sacred almanac by every subsequent
high culture in Mesoamerica. Indeed, as we will see, it served as the
very corner-stone of their developing
civilization.
From the internal structure of the sacred almanac it is
clear that this initial attempt to calibrate the seasons occurred in
the year 1359 B.C. and that the geographic locus of this experiment
was the large ceremonial site known as Izapa, situated in the
foothills of Soconusco immediately adjacent to the present border of
Guatemala.
Interestingly, it was in this same locale that an attempt to
refine the measurement of time was made some 35 years
later—perhaps even by the same priest who had set the sacred
almanac in motion. This second calendar defined the year as being 365
days in length, divided into eighteen twenty-day “months”
which were followed by five “useless” or
“unlucky” days. The beginning of the year was fixed by
the rising of the sun over the highest mountain in all of Central
America, the volcano Tajumulco (4,220 m or 13,842 ft), as seen from
Izapa—in this instance, an “horizon-based” event
which takes place on the summer solstice (June 22). Not only did this
secular calendar begin on a different date than the sacred almanac,
but the counting of its days also took place in a novel manner.
Although each “month” consisted of twenty days, the days
were numbered 0 through 19, rather than 1 through 20, making this the
first time in world history that the concept of zero was used. Of
course, to the Zoque priest who created the calendar, zero did not
stand for “nothing” but rather for “in
progress”, because according to his logic a day couldn’t
really be said to “exist” before it was completed. In
other words, he conceived of his tally working like an odometer
records distance in a car, i.e., a mile isn’t counted until
it’s actually been driven!
Perhaps it was the development of a calendar that permitted
the Zoque to successfully adapt the cultivation of maize to their
monsoon rain-forest environment that occasioned an increase in
population, but, whatever it was, within the following century they
began to show signs of a vigorous territorial expansion. One prong of
their expansion led southward through the Pacific coastal plain of
Guatemala and into the fringes of what today is El Salvador. Once the
heavy forest cover had been stripped from this region of rich
volcanic soils, many new ceremonial centers arose in the midst of
what soon became densely settled agricultural
areas. Another prong of
settlement pushed northwestward along the Pacific coastal plain of
Mexico, but in this direction the climate rapidly became drier, the
soils poorer, and the vegetation scrubbier, so this region held
little attraction for them. By the time they reached the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec, however, the mountain wall of the Sierra Madre that
defined the inland limit of Soconusco ended abruptly and a lowland
gap opened invitingly toward the Gulf of Mexico. Thus, even as they
roamed through the thorny scrub-forests of Tehuantepec they could see
ahead of them rain-heavy clouds pushing in from the sea to the north.
Once they had moved across the continental divide (which here
reaches scarcely 200 m or 650 ft
above sea-level), they found themselves in the largest alluvial
lowland in all of Mexico—an expanse of tropical rain forest far
vaster than that from which they had come in Soconusco. It was into
this lush, green environment—one in which they felt totally at
home—that they made their most vigorous and concerted
penetration beginning about the year 1300
B.C.
The most dramatic evidence of this Zoque push into the Gulf
coastal plain probably comes from the dispersal that took place in
the Maya-speaking peoples who previously inhabited the region. As the
advance of the Zoques from the south thrust a wedge into their midst,
the Maya were driven along the coast both to the east (where the bulk
of their people took refuge) and to the northwest (where a smaller
fraction of their numbers sought safety). As a result, the latter
group—the Huasteca—is the only Maya-speaking people who
do not reside in the far south and east of Mexico and who are totally
cut off from their linguistic relatives.
It was here in the verdant rain forests of the Gulf coastal
plain that the first clues of the mysterious people known as the
“Olmecs”, or “the rubber people from the
south”, came to light. The mystery began in 1862 when a ten-ton
“Colossal Head” carved from basalt and seemingly
depicting a personage with Negroid features wearing a helmet was
uncovered as the forest was being cleared to make way for a sugar
plantation. Soon other “Colossal Heads” and exquisitely
carved artifacts of jade began showing up elsewhere throughout the
jungle and gradually the outlines of several major ceremonial centers
were also laid bare. By the 1960’s the Gulf coastal plain of
Mexico had not only been identified by the archaeologists as the
“Olmec metropolitan area” but the culture itself was
being hailed—by the Mexicans at least—as the
“mother culture” of
Mesoamerica.
Radio-carbon dating helped to establish that the Olmec
ceremonial centers were in existence as much as 1,000 years earlier
than the oldest comparable sites of the Maya, and that many of the
cultural traits which had long been attributed to the latter were in
reality creations of the Olmecs, among them both the calendar and the
writing system used to record it.
However, as the “Olmec metropolitan area” is
examined more closely, its Zoque underpinnings can be clearly
discerned when a comparison is made of the key ceremonial centers of
the region in terms of their location in space and their origins in
time; indeed, the Zoque expansion into the Gulf coastal plain
represents a classic example of geographic diffusion. As the Zoque
poured through the Tehuantepec Gap into the valley of the Río
Coatzacoalcos, they constructed the first of their major ceremonial
centers on the banks of this great river at San Lorenzo about 1200
B.C. Following the “principle” they had
learned at Izapa, they were careful to lay out their
“city” so it was oriented to the highest mountain within
view, in this case to Zempoaltepec (3396 m or 11,138 ft) at the
winter solstice sunset. As the Zoque debouched farther out into the
coastal plain, they founded their next oldest settlements at La Venta
to the east and at Laguna de los Cerros to the west, both around 1000
B.C. Again, they deliberately
chose sites for their ceremonial centers so that they were aligned to
a solsticial event over the highest mountain that was locally
visible, in the case of La Venta to the Volcán San Martin at
the summer solstice sunset and at Laguna de los Cerros to the peak of
Cerro Santa Martha at the summer solstice
sunrise.
If the Zoques had continued their expansion into the
lowlands of Tabasco to the east, which is quite likely, it is
apparent that any evidence of such settlement in that area has been
all but destroyed by the subsequent meanderings of the great Grijalva
and Usumacinta rivers.
Here, the block of the earth’s crust beneath their
common delta is steadily sinking under the ever-accumulating weight
of the sediments which the rivers are depositing, so whatever centers
of population the Zoques may have founded in Tabasco three millennia
ago have long since disappeared into the swamps. Northwestward along
the coastal plain, however, the record of their presence is far more
complete, and their expansion likewise appears to have been far more
rapid. For example, Tres Zapotes was founded about 800 B.C., Cerro de
las Mesas probably not much later, and shortly thereafter Olmec
settlements show up in central Veracruz state (Remojadas and
Zempoala), in the highlands of Puebla (Cholula and Chalcatzingo) and
in the Valley of Mexico (Tlatilco and
Cuicuilco). And, without
exception, the Olmec principle of solsticial orientation was retained
in the siting of each of them.
One of the most recently discovered Olmec sites—and
also one of the most “surprising”—is
Teopantecuanitlán, located in the Balsas river valley of the
western Mexican state of Guerrero. Not only did its
“offside” geographic location come as something of a
shock to archaeologists, being so far removed from the “Olmec
metropolitan area”, but its dating was equally as disturbing --
1000 B.C.! Yet, like all the previously discovered Olmec sites, it
too, showed a solsticial orientation to the highest mountain in the
surrounding region—in this instance, to Teotepec (3704 m or
12,149 ft), the loftiest peak in the Sierra Madre del Sur, as well as
an architectural alignment to the August 13 sunset. Moreover, it
likewise appears to have the oldest recognizable numerals used in any
Mesoamerican inscription. The fact that Teopantecuanitlán is
located in the very heart of the region from which the Olmecs derived
their jade no doubt helps to explain why it became such an important
outpost at such an early date.
Unlike the initial Zoque expansion across the Tehuantepec
Gap, which most likely involved a fairly sizable movement of
land-hungry settlers, these further Olmec probes along the Gulf coast
and up onto the Meseta were no doubt accomplished by relatively small
bands of missionary-warriors—an elite vanguard of a dynamic,
cohesive society with its own distinctive and powerful economic,
social, and political character. There is no question that Olmec
religious beliefs exerted a strong influence on the other peoples and
cultures of Mexico because one of their principal deities—the
jaguar—came to be represented well beyond the limits of its
natural habitat. By the same token, the fact that the Olmec calendar
was designed for use in determining the arrival of the life-giving
monsoon meant that in all of the cultures where it was adopted the
rain-god soon was elevated to one of the highest positions in their
respective religious pantheons.
And, in the eventuality that the rain-god somehow failed to
meet the farmers’ needs, either in terms of timing or adequacy,
each of these cultures likewise adopted the well-established Olmec
practice of human sacrifice to placate him. Because representations
of armed warriors carrying spears and taking prisoners occur in art
throughout the sphere of Olmec influence, it is quite apparent that
the “gospel” they carried was not accepted peaceably by
all of the peoples with whom they came in contact.
Another prong of Olmec expansion can be traced up the
valley of the Río Tehuantepec into the highlands of Oaxaca
where the principal “converts” were the Zapotecs. Their
main ceremonial center, Monte Albán, dates back to at least
600 B.C., but differs from virtually all other such settlements in
Mesoamerica in being located at the top of a mountain—a 500 m
(1600 ft) eminence which overlooks the present-day city of Oaxaca.
Thus, it is clear that the site owes its existence to the earlier
Zapotec culture rather than to the Olmecs, for it would have been
sheer chance that Monte Albán’s mountain would have
happened to line up with another mountain—and specifically the
highest within view! -- on any of the key dates of the year.
Nevertheless, Olmec influence can no doubt be seen in the structure
known as Mound Y, whose large, irregular stonework not only indicates
that it was one of the earliest buildings constructed at the site but
whose doorway is also squarely oriented toward the sunset position on
August 13 -- a date which has no local astronomical significance
whatsoever. Even more conclusive a clue, however, is the Zapotec
version of the calendar, which only recently has been shown to have
begun on August 13 and to have run for 260 days through 13 numerical
permutations of 20 day-names and then to have completed the year by
repeating the first 105 number- and name-permutations over
again. Furthermore, the many
calendrical inscriptions at the site all employ the Olmec system of
numerical notation, a dot indicating a “one” and a bar
indicating a “five”—a fact which led many earlier
researchers to assume that the Mesoamerican calendar must have had
its birthplace in or near Monte
Albán.
Beyond the mountains to the northwest of Monte Albán
lived a people who posed a constant threat to the Zapotecs and who
ultimately moved in to conquer them. These were the Mixtecs, or
so-called “cloud people”, who, because of their
geographic location, were not reached by Olmec missionaries and the
innovation of the calendar until sometime after the Zapotecs. Indeed,
archaeologists date their ceremonial center at Huamelulpan to ca. 300
B.C., and although not much remains of the main pyramid there, its
massive foundation stones not only bear carvings of calendrical
glyphs in virtually mint condition but they are also squarely
oriented to the sunset position on August 13.
Ironically, what was to become the most triumphant
breakthrough of the calendar and the religious ideology that embodied
it came in the Valley of Mexico, due primarily to a natural
catastrophe that occurred there about 200 B.C. The volcano Xitle,
located a short distance to the southwest of the ceremonial center of
Cuicuilco, began an ominous eruption, sending streams of lava
cascading down toward the ancient settlement. The priests and the
people had plenty of warning, so there was nothing to do but
evacuate, and this they did by rounding the shores of the great Lake
of the Moon to the northeast, thereby putting that body of water
between themselves and the fiery volcano. Almost immediately they set
about laying out an even grander metropolis, conceived and
constructed on an immense scale in the relative safety of the broad
lake plain and commanding a low pass out of the Valley of Mexico
toward the lowlands of the Gulf coast. Not only did it occupy a
strategic location for trade but it also controlled a very valuable
resource that it could exchange for products from other
regions—namely obsidian, or volcanic glass, highly prized for
making tools and weapons because of the razor like edges it
yielded.
We know the city only by the name the Aztecs called it:
Teotihuacán, or “place of the gods”. They gave it
this name because of the colossal size of its pyramids, despite the
ruined condition in which they found them many centuries later. Even
today the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon loom out of
the plain like miniature mountains. Thinking these pyramids to be the
resting places of gigantic deities, the Aztecs called the broad
avenue running down the middle of the site the “Street of the
Dead”. What the Aztecs did not know, and what remained to be
demonstrated only a quarter-century ago, was that the entire city had
been constructed according to a meticulous grid oriented toward the
sunset position on August 13 -- once again proving the pervasive role
of the sacred calendar which had come into being well over millennium
earlier and more than 1000 km (600 mi) away to the south. Almost just
as surprising was the discovery, confirmed in 1993, that
Teotihuacán, like all Olmec-inspired ceremonial centers, owes
its precise geographic location to the fact that it, too, is
solsticially oriented. In this instance, however, the mountain in
question is not visible, because a low ridge obscures the
southeastern horizon. Yet, at the crest of this ridge, precisely on the
azimuth of the winter solstice sunrise between Teotihuacán and
the highest mountain in Mexico, the Volcán Orizaba, or
Citlaltepec (“the mountain of the star”) (5701 m, or
18,700 ft), lie the remains of what was most likely a
“relay-station”. From this point, priests atop the
Pyramid of the Sun could easily have been alerted—whether by
smoke signals or the reflections of a polished hematite
mirror—that the sun had once again begun its long-awaited
return to the north. What is perhaps the most impressive aspect of
this entire scenario is that, even in their terror-stricken flight
from Cuicuilco, the Olmec priests dared not defy the age-old practice
of aligning their ceremonial centers with the highest of mountains,
and in this case they chose the grandest peak of all to mark the
location of what was ultimately to become the greatest of all
Mesoamerican metropolises.
Perhaps the commotion caused by Xitle’s eruption, the
abandonment of Cuicuilco, and the founding of Teotihuacán so
preoccupied the priests of the plateau that an innovative refinement
in the Olmec calendar that occurred about the same time escaped their
notice. Or, it may have been that word of this new development simply
never reached the meseta, a “victim” of what the
geographer calls
“distance-decay”. Or, if it did reach their attention, perhaps they
saw no merit in it and rejected it on that
account. Whatever the explanation may be, we will, of
course, never know, but about the same time as the lava began
streaming down over Cuicuilco, a priest somewhere back in either the
“Olmec metropolitan area” or in Soconusco itself came up
with a truly remarkable idea—one that would leave them forever
the poorer for having missed or ignored it.
The innovation consisted of meshing the 260-day sacred
almanac with the 365-day secular calendar into what archaeologists
have come to call the “Long Count”. Although the idea was
simple enough, the ingenuity of it marked a quantum leap in
intellectual sophistication because it not only gave the Olmecs a
sense of history but it also provided them with a
“timetable” for the world’s
creation.
With two time-counts running concurrently, it was soon
apparent to the priests who oversaw them that their lowest common
denominator amounted to 18,980 days, which equates to 73 rounds of
the 260-day sacred almanac and to 52 cycles of the 365-day secular
calendar. Thus, if the beginning day of the sacred almanac, 1 Imix,
had fallen on the beginning day of the secular calendar, 0 Pop, in a
given year, then it would take 52 years before the same two day-names
and -numbers would again
coincide. Small wonder,
then, why all Mesoamerican societies came to believe that
“history repeats itself” every 52 years.
For most of the peoples to whom the Olmecs bequeathed the
calendars, no further sophistication seemed necessary. After all, the
average longevity of a typical person
in those days was probably not much more than 30 years, so it would
have been a rare individual indeed who would have lived to see the
same day-names and -numbers recur within his or her lifetime. In
fact, in many of the cultures the 52-year period was itself equated
with a “lifetime”, whereas a double period of 104 years
was referred to as the
lifetime of “a very old person.” As a result, in most of
the cultures, important events such as births and deaths and
accessions to power by key members of the society were seldom
specified more closely than to the 52-year period in which they
occurred. Thus, if we find glyphs telling of a personage by the name
of “1 Reed”—which was an element, for example, in
the name of the god-king Quetzalcóatl—we know that the
given individual was born on a day with that number and name, but we
can’t pinpoint the calendar year in which the event occurred
unless we know the specific 52-year cycle during which it took
place. This custom of citing dates
only in terms of a given 52-year cycle has been called the
“Short Count” by archaeologists.
We can only guess at what it was that led to the
development of the “Long Count”. Perhaps it was simply
the dissatisfaction with a time-reckoning system that had so little
concern for history that it couldn’t define the great events of
a society closer than to a given 52-year period. Or perhaps it was an
attempt to “squeeze” more precision out of the two
time-counts, neither of which recorded the celestial cycles with
convincing accuracy. Or was it intended to facilitate more
sophisticated computations, such as those involved in the prediction
of eclipses? Or perhaps it was just some priest’s means of
“guesstimating” when the world had begun? After all,
these kinds of questions have likewise prompted the various dabblings
which have occurred from time to time in Western civilization, not
alone with our present Gregorian calendrical system but with the
previous Julian system as well.
The first clue as to when the Long Count was devised was
found in Maya calendrical glyphs which always mention a day called
“4 Ahau 8 Cumku” as the beginning date of their count.
Although many researchers have advanced hypotheses as to what the
corresponding date must have been according to the Christian
calendar, three of them—an American in 1905, a Mexican in 1926,
and an Englishman in 1927 -- all produced solutions which came within
a day or two of each other and which are more closely in accord with
radio-carbon dates and astronomical observations than any of the
other proposed correlations. Named for the three
independent researchers who worked it out, the
Goodman-Martínez-Thompson correlation fixes the beginning date
of the Maya Long Count as August 13, 3114
B.C.
The perceptive reader will immediately recognize the key
importance of the month and day mentioned in this date, but what of
the year? Realizing that it is far too old to record any historical
event in Mesoamerica, students of the question quickly concluded that
it must be a mythological date of origin, akin to that of the
founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus or to the creation of the earth
as defined by Bishop Usher.
Subsequent study of the internal structure of the two
calendars suggested that they were meshed into the Long Count in the
year 236 B.C., a finding that has more recently been confirmed by
detailed computer analysis.
The great beauty of the Long Count was that it not only gave
each and every day its own unique number and name, but it also gave
the priests a benchmark against which they could calculate the number
of days which had elapsed since “the beginning of time”,
or “the creation of the present world”. Naturally, with
such a running count underway, it was a relatively simple matter to
keep records of the intervals between events like eclipses, thereby
allowing the priests to predict their next occurrences, so the Long
Count greatly enhanced the accuracy of Maya astronomy as a result.
Interestingly, a similar line of thought produced a very similar
result and for very similar reasons in Europe nearly 1800 years later
when Joseph Scaliger devised the idea of the Julian Day number in
1582 -- which, despite the rather “quaint” premises on
which it is based, still remains a useful tool in modern science
today.
If the timing of the Long Count’s creation is no
longer in doubt, the same cannot be said for the locus of its
creation, although it is possible to narrow it down to either the
“Olmec metropolitan area” or Soconusco. The rationale for
this is that the six oldest and most geographically
“fixed” inscriptions bearing Long Count dates all occur
along an axis that stretches across the Tehuantepec
Gap. Two of the
inscription-bearing stelae were found in Guatemalan Soconusco, three
others were discovered in the Gulf coastal plain, and one was located
in the Grijalva depression of Chiapas state about half way in
between. Small as the data sample is,
it appears that the birthplace of the Long Count most likely was to
be found in the “Olmec metropolitan area” for,
ironically, of all the peoples of Mesoamerica, it was only the Maya
who ultimately made use of it. And it was they who made the
most prodigious achievements in pre-Columbian astronomy and
mathematics as a result.