The Mayan Calendar, Solar - Agricultural Year, and Correlation Questions

Conclusion

As a result of examining the above facts, and the consistency with which they are presented throughout the colonial literature, there seems to be little doubt that the Colonial Yucatecan Maya viewed their calendar as being a fixed solar year calendar, and that their major calendar cycle was a 24 year Ahau Katun cycle. Scholars vary in their interpretation of how this came about. Most claim that the Colonial Yucatecan Maya were mistaken about their calendar, and of this group some have gone so far as to say that some Mayan writer of the 17th, 18th, or even possibly the 19th century reorganized the calendar system to keep it in tune with the European calendar so that 1 Poop would fall on the 16th of July of the Julian calendar. As can be seen by a thorough review of the Books of Chilam Balam, this latter possibility seems quite remote, as this writer would have had to have been extremely thorough in finding all the various references to dates found throughout the material presented in these books and then would have had to have changed these dates to conform with his new calendar. In as much as not one of the source books for the material of the Books of Chilam Balam is a complete collection of dated literature, it seems hard to imagine, especially at a later date, how this writer would have had such a pervasive influence over the dating system in the colonial manuscripts. Other scholars claim that the Yucatecan Maya were in fact either in the process of a calendar reform as the Spanish arrived, or had gone through such a reform shortly before their arrival, but that in any case the Mayan calendar had become a fixed solar year calendar and that the 24 year Ahau Katunoob resulting in a 312 year katun cycle had been established by the time that the Mayans had been conquered. There is no evidence which I have seen in the colonial literature which would either confirm or deny this claim. Finally, it must be said that almost no one makes a claim that the Mayan calendar with a fixed solar year and with 24 year Ahau Katunoob is of long standing.

My own view is that the Mayan calendar as presented by colonial sources was firmly established by the end of the 16th century and that there is evidence that it was already in use when the Spanish were making their first landfalls on the coast of Yucatán. Furthermore, based on the names and in a couple of instances the hieroglyphic representations of certain uinals it would seem that a fixed solar year calendar was already operating during the classic Maya period. Beyond that I can make no judgments at this time.

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