The third counterargument is psychological. In part, as Alfred Crosby admitted, he initially devoted attention to the possible American origin of syphilis “because I was uneasy about so many diseases crossing west over the Atlantic and none going east.” He thought there must be some sort of “epidemiological-geographical symmetry.” Other historians followed suit. Later Crosby realized that examining the evidence in the hope of redressing the infectious balance was a mistake. “They want pox in Europe to balance the scales for smallpox in Mexico,” Vine Deloria Jr. told me. “They’re all hoping to find there’s a real Montezuma’s Revenge.”
Yet even if syphilis did originate in the New World, the scales would not be balanced. Syphilis is fascinating, “like all things venereal,” Crosby wrote in 2003, “but it was not a history-maker” like smallpox. Treponema pallidum, awful as it was and is, did not help topple empires or push whole peoples to extinction. “There was little symmetry in the exchange of diseases between the Old and the New Worlds,” Crosby said, “and there are few factors as influential in the history of the last half millennium as that.”
APPENDIX D
Calendar Math
Dictionaries define the calendar almost as if it were a machine: “a system for fixing the beginning, length, and divisions of the civil year.” But in every society calendars are much more than that. People experience time as both linear and circular. On the one hand, it marches remorselessly from birth to death, a vector with fixed end-points and a constant velocity. On the other hand, time is cyclical, with the wheel of the seasons endlessly spinning, and no clear end or beginning. Calendars are records of a culture’s attempt to weight and reconcile these different visions.
In early European societies, the end of the year was regarded as dangerous: a period when the calendar literally runs out of days, the landscape is blanketed by night and cold, and nobody can be truly certain that the heavens would usher in a new year. Embodying that mysterious time when the end of the calendar somehow looped round and rejoined itself at the beginning, Romans celebrated Saturnalia, an upside-down week when masters served their servants and slaves held the great offices of state. The Christian calendar bracketed the strange, perilous final days of the year on one end with the birth of Christ, symbol of renewal, on December 25, and on the other with Epiphany, the day when the three kings recognized the infant Jesus as the Savior, another symbol of renewal, on January 6. Christmas and Epiphany bridge the dangerous gap between the end of one year and the beginning of the next.
The Mesoamerican calendar also tied together linear and cyclical time, but more elaborately. In its most fully developed form, at the height of Maya power, it consisted of three separate but interrelated calendars: a sacred tally known as the tzolk’in; the haab, a secular calendar based, like the Western calendar, on the rotation of the sun; and the Long Count, a system that, among other things, linked the other two.
The sacred calendar is both the calendar most dissimilar to Western calendars and the most important culturally. Each day in the tzolk’in had a name and a number, in somewhat the same way that one might refer to, say, “Wednesday the 15th.” In the Western calendar, the day names (e.g., Wednesday) run through cycles of seven, making weeks, and the day numbers (e.g., the 15th) run through cycles of 28, 30, or 31, making months. The tzolk’in used the same principle, but with less variation in the lengths of the cycles; it had a twenty-day “week” of named days and a thirteen-day “month” of numbered days. The analogy I am drawing is imprecise; what I am describing as the tzolk’in “week” was longer than the “month.” But just as Thursday the 16th follows Wednesday the 15th in the Christian calendar, 10 Akbal would follow 9 Ik in the tzolk’in. (The Maya had a twenty-day “week” in part because their number system was base-20, instead of the base-10 in European societies.)
Because the tzolk’in was not intended to track the earth’s orbit around the sun, its inventors didn’t have to worry about fitting their “weeks” and “months” into the 365 days of the solar year. Instead they simply set the first day of the year to be the first day of the twenty-day “week” and the thirteen-day “month,” and let the cycle spin. In the language of elementary school mathematics, the least common multiple (the smallest number that two numbers will divide into evenly) of 13 and 20 is 260. Hence, the tzolk’in had a length of 260 days.
In the Western calendar, a given combination of named and numbered days, such as Wednesday the 15th, will occur a few times in a calendar year. For instance, in 2006 the 15th of the month falls on Wednesday three times, in February, March, and November; in 2007 Wednesday the 15th occurs just once, in August. The irregular intervals are due to the differing lengths of the months, which throw off the cycle. In the tzolk’in, every “month” and every “week” are the same length. As a result, “Wednesday the 15th”—or 1 Imix, to give a real example—in the tzolk’in recurs at precise intervals; each is exactly 13 × 20 or 260 days apart.
Many researchers believe the movements of Venus, which Mesoamerican astronomers tracked carefully, originally inspired the tzolk’in. Venus is visible for about 263 consecutive days as the morning star, then goes behind the sun for 50 days, then reappears for another 263 days as the evening star. It was a powerful presence in the heavens, as I noted in Chapter 8, and a calendar based on its celestial trajectory would have shared some of that power. Within the sacred year, every day was thought to have particular characteristics, so much so that people were often named after their birth dates: 12 Eb, 2 Ik, and so on. In some places men and women apparently could not marry if they had the same name day. Days in the tzolk’in had import for larger occasions, too. Events from ceremonies to declarations of war were thought to be more likely to succeed if they occurred on a propitious day.
The Mesoamerican calendar was both more complex and more accurate than the European calendars of the same period. It consisted of a 365-day secular calendar, the haab (right), much like contemporary European calendars. The haab was tied to the second, sacred calendar, the tzolk’in (left), which was unlike any Western calendar. With a “week” of twenty named days and a “month” of thirteen numbered days, the tzolk’in produced a 260-day “year.” Mesoamerican societies used both simultaneously, so that every date was labeled with two names (1 Ix 0 Xul in the drawing). I have not rendered the haab as a wheel-within-wheel like the tzolk’in, even though it, too, had perfectly regular “weeks” and “months.” This is because the haab had to fit the 365-day solar year, which forced Maya calendar designers to spoil their system by tacking on an irregular, extra-short month at the end. (Illustration Credit a.1)
Because people also needed a civil calendar for mundane purposes like knowing when to sow and harvest, Mesoamerican societies had a second, secular calendar, the haab: eighteen “months,” each of twenty days. (Unlike the tzolk’in, which counted off the days from 1, the haab months began with 0; nobody knows why the system was different.) Simple arithmetic shows that eighteen twenty-day months generates a 360-day year, five days short of the requisite 365 days. Indians knew it, too. Rather than sprinkling the extra five days throughout the year as we do, though, they tacked them onto the end in a special “month” of their own. These days were thought to be unlucky—it was as if the year ended with five straight days of Friday the 13th. Although the ancient Maya knew (unlike their contemporaries in Europe) that the solar year is actually 365¼ days, they did not bother to account for the extra quarter day; there were no leap years in Mesoamerica. The failure to do so seems surprising, given that their astronomers’ mania for precision had led them to measure the length of the lunar month to within about ten seconds.
With two calendars, every day thus had two names, a sacred tzolk’in name and a civil haab name. Usually the Maya referred to them by both at once: 1 Ix 0 Xul. The two different calendars, each perfectly regular (but one more regular than the other), marched in lockstep, forming what is now called the Calendar Round. After one 1 Ix 0 Xul, there would not be another 1 Ix 0 Xul fo
r 18,980 days, about fifty-two years.
By describing dates with both calendars Mesoamerican societies were able to give every day in this fifty-two-year period a unique name. But they couldn’t distinguish one fifty-two-year period from its predecessors and successors—as if the Christian calendar couldn’t distinguish 1810, 1910, and 2010. To avoid confusion and acknowledge time’s linear dimension, Mesoamerican societies invented the Long Count, which counts off the days from a starting point that is believed to have been in mid-August, 3114 B.C. Long Count dates consisted of the number of days, 20-day “months,” 360-day “years,” 7,200-day “decades,” and 144,000-day “centuries” since the beginning. Archaeologists generally render these as a set of five numbers separated by dots. When Columbus landed, on Tuesday, October 11, 1492, the Maya would have marked the day as 11.13.12.4.3, with the “centuries” first and the days last. In the tzolk’in and haab, the day was 2 Akbal 6 Zotz.
Although extant Long Count dates have only five positions for numbers, the Maya knew that eventually that time would pass and they would have to add more positions. Indeed, their priestly mathematicians had calculated nineteen further positions, culminating in what is now called the alautun, a period of 23,040,000,000 days, which is about 63 million years. Probably the longest named interval of time in any calendar, the alautun is a testament to the grandiosity of Mesoamerican calendries. Just as the tzolk’in is one of the most impeccably circular time cycles ever invented, the Long Count is among the most purely linear, an arrow pointing straight ahead for millions of years into the future.
But wait—isn’t the Internet full of claims that the Maya calendar doesn’t go into the future? That it ends, suddenly and dramatically, on the date 13.0.0.0.0, which in today’s terms is December 21, 2012? And when the calendar ends, didn’t the Maya predict a global calamity?
To be sure, a four-zero date like 13.0.0.0.0 only occurs every 5,126 years in the Maya calendar. But the claim that 13.0.0.0.0 date will lead to disaster dates back not to ancient times but mainly to 1996, when two modern epigraphers released a partial description of a Maya text on a broken monument found in the Mexican state of Tobasco. The monument, the epigraphers explained, “recorded a calendrical event in the early 21st century A.D., at which time, apparently, the god [Bolon Yokte’ K’uh] may ‘descend’ ye-ma, y-emal [there are some technical problems with this translation].” The “event,” the two scholars said, was apparently related to the fact that “the 13 baktuns will be finished at 13.0.0.0.0. in the Maya Long Count.” To some readers, this sounded like an ancient prophecy: on the day the calendar runs out of numbers, a celestial being will touch down on the planet—the end of life as we know it.
Despite being printed as an aside—in a footnote, no less—in an archaeological journal, the “prophecy” was picked up by the surprisingly large number of people with a passionate interest in the implications of pre-Columbian timekeeping and active Internet connections. Noting the interest, archaeologists paid more attention to the text. A more formal rendering appeared in 2010:
Eight Katun and three Baktun (forward),
It will be completed the thirteenth Baktun;
It will be 4 Ajau 3 Kankin.
It will happen; the witnessing of
The adornments of Bolon Yokte’
In the great investiture.
Matthew Restall and Amara Solari, Maya specialists at, respectively, Pennsylvania State University and Oregon State University, have suggested that the translation might be more colloquially put as:
The thirteenth calendrical cycle will end on the day of 4 Ahau 3 Kankin, when there will occur a spectacle and Bolon Yokte’ will come down to a great investiture.
Put this way, the text sounds less like a prophecy and more like a promise, in a far-distant time, of an excellent party. But when Stephen Houston and David Stuart, the two original translators, retracted their initial paraphrase and said the monument made no prophecy, they were attacked by what might be called “2012ologists,” who accused them of covering up the truth.
Archaeologists of the Maya tend to be annoyed by 2012 speculation. Not only is it mistaken, they believe, but it fundamentally misrepresents the Maya. Rather than being an example of native wisdom, scholars say, the apocalyptic “prophecy” is a projection of European values and ideas onto non-European people. The society with a long history of anticipating the Apocalypse is not the Maya, but Christian Europe. Europeans, not Maya, went into panic when the calendar turned up zeroes in 1000 A.D. The 2012 commotion, Restall and Solari argue, is testament to our continuing inability to stop viewing other societies as extensions of ourselves. Four centuries after Columbus, his descendants still have trouble seeing the people he encountered.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In putting together this book I worked under the shadow of great travelers, scientists, and historians ranging from William H. Prescott, Francis Parkman, and John Lloyd Stephens in the nineteenth century to (I cite only a sampler) William Cronon, Alfred W. Crosby, William M. Denevan, Francis Jennings, John Hemming, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roderick Nash, and Carl Sauer in the twentieth and twenty-first. The comparison is daunting. Luckily, I have been able to benefit from the advice, encouragement, and criticism of many scholars, beginning with Crosby and Denevan themselves. A number of researchers read the draft manuscript in part or whole, a great kindness for which I thank Crosby, Denevan, William Balée, Clark Erickson, Susanna Hecht, Frances Karttunen, George Lovell, Michael Moseley, James Petersen, Matthew Restall, and William I. Woods. Although they helped me enormously, the book is mine in the end, as are its remaining errors of fact and balance.
I am grateful to all the researchers who were kind enough to put aside their doubts long enough to help a journalist, but in addition to those mentioned above I would especially like to thank—for favors, insights, or just the gift of time—Helcio Amiral, Flavio Aragon Cuevas, Charles Clement, Michael Crawford, Winifred Creamer, Vine Deloria Jr., Henry F. Dobyns, Elizabeth Fenn, Stuart Fiedel, Susan deFrance, Jonathan Haas, Susanna Hecht, Charles Kay, Patricia Lyon, Beata Madari, David Meltzer, Len Morse-Fortier, Michael Moseley, Eduardo Neves, Hugo Perales, Amado Ramírez Leyva, Anna C. Roosevelt, Nelsi N. Sadeck, the late Wim Sombroek, Russell Thornton, Alexei Vranich, Patrick Ryan Williams, and a host of Bolivian, Brazilian, Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. graduate students. My gratitude to the editors of the magazines in which bits of 1491 first appeared: Corby Kummer, Cullen Murphy, Sue Parilla, Bill Whitworth, and the late Mike Kelly at The Atlantic Monthly; Tim Appenzeller, Elizabeth Culotta, Colin Norman, and Leslie Roberts at Science; David Shipley and Carmel McCoubrey at the New York Times; Nancy Franklin at Harvard Design Magazine; and George Lovell at Journal of the Southwest.
For library access, travel tips, withering critiques, friendly encouragement at psychologically critical times, and a daunting list of other favors I owe debts to Bob Crease, Josh D’Aluisio-Guerreri, Dan Farmer (and all the folks on the fish.com listservs), Dave Freedman, Judy Hooper, Pam Hunter (and Carl, too, of course), Toichiro and Masa Kinoshita, Steve Mann, Cassie Phillips, Ellen Shell, Neal Stephenson, Gary Taubes, Dick Teresi, and Zev Trachtenberg. Newell Blair Mann was a boon traveling companion in Bolivia and Brazil; Bruce Bergethon indulged me by coming to Cahokia; Peter Menzel went with me to Mexico four times. Jim Boyce helped get me to Oaxaca and CIMMYT. Nick Springer provided a design for the rough maps that Tim Gibson and I put together. Stephen S. Hall was really, really patient and really, really helpful about the immune system. Ify and Ekene Nwokoye tried at various times to keep me organized. Brooke Childs worked on photo permissions. Mark Plummer provided me with far too many favors to list. The same for Rick Balkin (the fifth book for which he has done so). June Kinoshita and Tod Machover allowed me to finish Chapter 4 in their carriage house in Waltham. My deepest gratitude to Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, who let my family and me stay in their guesthouse in Napa, where Chapters 6 through 8 emerged into the world. Caroline Mann read an early draft and provided many useful
comments. Last-minute help from Dennis Normile and the Foreign Correspondents Club of Tokyo is hereby recognized and thanked.
I am lucky in my publishers, Knopf in the United States and Granta in the United Kingdom. In this, our third book together, Jon Segal at Knopf demonstrated his mastery of not only the traditional pencil skills of the classic editor but also the new techniques the times require to send a book on its way. In addition, I must doff my beret in Borzoi land to Kevin Bourke, Roméo Enriquez, Ida Giragossian, Andy Hughes, and Virginia Tan. At Granta, Sara Holloway gave excellent advice and tolerated repeated auctorial meddling and procrastination. So many other people in so many places pulled strings on my behalf, tolerated repeated phone calls, arranged site visits, edited or checked manuscripts, and sent me hard-to-find articles and books that I could not possibly list them all. I hope that in the end this book seems to them worth the trouble.
NOTES
Every book is built on other books, the adage says, and this one is an exemplary case. Think of the list of texts below as the architect’s specifications for 1491. Except that this list is more selective, consisting as it does only of the works consulted necessary to make a particular point, not everything used in the construction of the book. If at all possible, I have cited printed, English-language versions of each source; many texts can be found online, too, but URLs change so fast that I have avoided listing them whenever possible. Texts available on the Web as of early 2005 are indicated by a star (*); most can be found through search engines or in such collections as Early English Books Online, Project Gutenberg, the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center, the University of Maryland’s Early American Digital Archive, and the Virtual Cervantes Library.