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Maya dates reach back 33,000 years
Vast time spans
In the 1930s, scholar J. Eric Thompson called the Maya esoteric time worshipers and held that those enormous spans signified nothing. A recent argument holds that they display an understanding of the precession of the equinoxes, the slow wobble that resets the stars' positions every 25,000 to 26,000 years.
Seventy-two years
The stars move one degree every 72 years. A star that rises on the horizon on a certain date will rise one day later 72 years on, and a couple of generations of records can prove it. Writing made that possible, since an astronomer could spend a lifetime recording the sky and hand the book to an apprentice. Grasping precession is the holy grail of ancient astronomy.
Sticks and ropes
The method could be as simple as one person at a fixed spot with a stick, and another with a second stick tied to a rope, pulled out to the same distance each time. Mark where the sun rises each day and the point drifts out and comes back. Stars take far longer to track, because the backdrop the sun and moon travel through is itself moving.
Why does precession shift the stars?
Earth's axis wobbles slowly like a spinning top, and one full wobble takes about 26,000 years. As it turns, the point where the sun crosses the equator in spring moves against the background stars. The Greek astronomer Hipparchus discovered precession in the second century BCE. He compared his star positions with older records.
How do we link the Long Count to our calendar?
Scholars use a correlation to match Maya dates to the Gregorian calendar. The most widely used one is the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson correlation. It places the start of the current Long Count era on August 11, 3114 BCE. The match rests on dates in Spanish colonial records and on astronomical events in the codices.
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