[Aztlan] Correction to part of John Major Jenkins statement

[Robert F. Wald]

Just a brief note to add to Elaine's comment (although not a 
correction to John Major Jenkins statement):

In my view of the Classic Maya Calendar, the 260 day calendar is 
cyclical, the 365 day calendar is cyclical, the 584 day Venus 
calendar, and the 52 year calendar (among several others) are all 
cyclical.  But the long count is not.  All evidence from the 
inscriptions indicates that the number of the Baktun cycle and cycles 
above the Baktun (Pik) increase (or return to zero) as time goes on 
at the end of each time period of K'ins, Winals, Haabs, etc.  This is 
true whether one thinks that the next Baktun number after the 13th is 
14 or zero after increasing the Pictun by 1.  This is analogous to 
the Julian/Gregorian calendar increasing from 999 to 1000 by 
increasing one place value.  In sum, there is no reason to cut off 
the number of cycles at the Baktun level.  What is more, there is 
also no apparent reason to limit the number of the time-period 
designations above the Baktun cycle to those found at Yaxchilan or 
Coba since they do not match each other in number either.

It is also interesting that, without equating the two calendars, the 
Gregorian calendar is also composed of cycles in similar ways to the 
Classic Maya calendar.  As far as the cyclicity of the Maya calendar 
is concerned, it seems to me that there is no evidence that the 
Classic Maya believed that actual historical events themselves would 
repeat just because the cycles themselves repeated.  Of course, 
seasons for agricultural activities and good and bad days for 
activities would return -- and people involved in various activities 
dependent upon those cycles would perform similar ones (but not the 
self-same ones) again (similarly to what occurs in societies using 
the Gregorian calendar).  All this mainly becomes a problem mainly 
when one assumes that the Maya as well as other colonized people 
thought that actual historical events themselves repeated when those 
cycles repeated.  Such ideas concerning the views of non-European 
indigenous peoples was more common in later 19th and earlier 20th 
centuries under the influence of Hegel's ideas about 
history.  Unfortunately this also colored the early anthropologists' 
views of those non-European cultures.

Robert Wald