Victoria R. Bricker

Astronomical References in the Throne Inscription of the Palace of the Governor at Uxmal

The Palace of the Governor at Uxmal is known from previous scholarship to be associated with Venus in terms of both its sculptural decoration and its orientation, which is aligned to an infrequently occurring extreme position of Venus on the horizon. A hieroglyphic inscription above the central doorway of the Palace is shown here to relate specifically to the concern with Venus and other celestial phenomena. Part of the inscription depicts zodiacal constellations, and its uppermost row is a sort of map of the constellations at the ‘base of the sky’ at the time of the Venus alignment. The Throne Inscription from Uxmal may now be recognized as one of the major sources of information about the pre-Columbian Maya zodiac.

Classic Maya Prediction of Solar Eclipses [and Comments and Reply]

Work by earlier scholars has shown that the Dresden Codex contains a table of temporal intervals appropriate to the cyclic occurrence of solar eclipses. This paper demonstrates that if the Maya calendrical dates in the table are converted to the Gregorian calendar by using the so-called Modified Thompson 2 correlation constant, the table gives very accurate warnings of solar eclipses for the late-8th-century A.D. span to which it refers. During the approximately 33 years between November 10,755, and September 6, 788, all of teh 77 solar eclipses affecting the planet occurred within three days of dates appearing in the table. Although most of these eclipses did not affect the Maya area, the table itself provides a mechanism for recognizing and discounting irrelevant predictions. No visible solar eclipse of the late 8th century could have occurred without a very precise warning if the table were used in the fashion suggested here. It has often been assumed that the table was intended to be recycled or reused, but scholars have differed on how this might have been done. This paper suggests that the information necessary to an accurate recycling is given in the tables own introduction. Using this information, a model for recycling and periodically correcting the table over a span of approximately 1,400 years is presented and tested against the data of Western astronomy. The efficacy of the recycled tables as solar eclipse warning devices proves as high as that of the original.

Climatic Signatures in Yucatecan Wills and Death Records

Dense collections of eighteenth-century wills and death registers from Tekanto and Ixil, two towns in northern Yucatan, represent hitherto unexplored sources for documenting the relationship between natural disasters and mortality patterns among the Yucatecan Maya during colonial times. They provide detailed, sometimes daily, records of the impact of famines caused by multiyear droughts, hurricanes, and plagues of locusts on the agrarian population of the peninsula, which supplement the brief, impressionistic accounts of historians.

Deciphering the Handwriting on the Wall: Some Astronomical Interpretations of the Recent Discoveries at Xultun, Guatemala

This study places the recently excavated ninth-century A.D. four-part calendrical notations at Xultun (Lunar Table, Ring Number, Long Count, and Multiplication Table) in the context of both Classic monumental inscriptions and astronomical knowledge in the Postclassic Dresden Codex. We demonstrate that the Lunar Table employed a formula attributed to Palenque and that it could have been used as a device to determine precisely where to break the sequence of alternating 29- and 30-day months one finds on dated monuments. All four categories found at Xultun appear in the Dresden Codex. The Ring Number, which bridges a date in the deep past with one in the recently completed era, is a perfect fit with one of the most fundamental Dresden eclipse cycles. Our analysis of glyphs accompanying the Long Count date enables us to place candidate eclipses, especially one that corresponds with a conjunction of Mars, in real time. We argue that the large multiples were extracted from, or prepared for, warning tables like the Dresden eclipse table, and we demonstrate why such tables must have existed well before the Xultun inscriptions. Thus, while the writings in the Dresden manuscript constitute a finished product, the writing on the wall of residential Structure 10K-2 is more akin to what one might find in an astronomers notebook.