No other people in history made of time so great a fetish as the Maya (Coggins, 1979; von Hagen, 1961). Without doubt, time - and man's perception of it - has played an important role in the development of civilizations throughout the world (Thompson, 1966). The pre-Columbian Mayan civilization was no exception to the general rule. Instead, it raised the science of time-keeping via the calendar to a level of accomplishment that was as accurate as the sophisticated, verified calculations of today. The question immediately raised, of course, is: Why? Why such a preoccupation with time? With record-keeping? With such single-minded attention to accuracy that the Mayans devised not one but three calendar systems? The answer, not surprisingly for a civilization that never progressed technologically into the post-Stone Age, lies in agriculture.
Mayan civilization can roughly be divided into three periods: Preclassic (circa 1000 BC-250 AD), Classic (250-900 AD), and Postclassic (900-1697 AD). Mayan culture exists today in the same geographical areas of southern Mexico and northern Central America in which it predominated in pre-Columbian days, a combination of temperate highlands and lowland rain forests. 1697 is marked as the official end of the Mayan civilization, for that is the year in which the last Maya kingdom, Tayasal, was taken by the Spanish conquistadors. In reality, in the highland regions of Mexico the Mayan political influence had been overshadowed by the Aztec civilization for centuries. In the Central American lowland regions, internecine rivalries and still unexplained changes, probably natural disasters as well as political ones, Mayan hegemony had collapsed as a unifying force by the 10th century (Gyles & Sayer, 1980).
The history of Mesoamerican peoples is nothing if not linear. Just as the Aztecs trace major elements of their civilization to the earlier Mayan influence, so, too, do the Mayans trace ...