Art: A FEW BAKTUNS AGO

In the great, green-grown rain forests of Middle America, archaeologists are uncovering at a laborious pace the remains of the incredible art and culture of Indians who lived as long as 3,000 years ago. They have found, buried beneath the brush and muck of the jungle, skillfully formed stone sculpture done by Olmecs perhaps a millennium before Christ. Even more remarkable was the civilization of the Mayans, whose artists, sculptors and priest-scientists of some 1,500 years ago left behind marvels of work and thought. so advanced that they have been called the Greeks of America.

Each new discovery seems to ignite a new chain reaction of revised conclusions about the Mayans. Archaeologists have found in Bonampak and Palenque, Chiapas State, Mexico, evidence that they were not the peace-loving esthetes (v. the later, barbaric Aztecs) that they had been labeled earlier, for their murals show them as cruel, bloody soldiers. But the Mayans deserve their original reputation as a people of high culture. Their sculpture and architecture glow with color, intricate detail, lively movement and full-dimensional symbolism (see color pages).

All the more astonishing is the evidence of a scientific society that produced a calendar (circa 353 B.C.), based on astronomical observations, which is considered more accurate than the Julian calendar that was devised in 46 B.C. The Mayans reckoned time from a zero date beginning, according to one scientist, with Oct. 15, 3375 B.C. Their month (urinal) lasted 20 days; a year (tun) 18 months, or 360 days,’ which was completed (to correspond more accurately to the solar year) by adding five so-called “unlucky days.” Thus they had a fixed calendar year of 365 days. It was nearly six hours shorter than the true year, so they worked out a system of correction (in the 6th or 7th century) that did not disturb the order of months and days in their calendar. This formula was at least as accurate as the Gregorian leap-year correction which was not introduced until 1582.

A people with a big sense of history, the Mayans even calculated time divisions to include a 400-year unit 1582 and ultimately an alautun (64 million years). It was, presumably, in carefully built astronomical observatories such as that in Chichen Itza on the Yucatan peninsula (opposite) that the Mayans perfected their calendar. Three square openings in the masonry walls fixed sight lines on the heavens for specific reference points, where the sun and moon could best be observed at their most informative stages.

Despite the fabulous wealth already uncovered, archaeologists estimate that only 10% of Mayan ruins and treasures have been found. They also believe that new discoveries from the little known Olmec culture ‘might throw a new light on early American history.