ARCHAIC ANNUAL CALENDAR. 



The use to be made of this calendar is too self-evident to require explanation. 

 The numerals of the day Ahau are put in bolder type to assist the eye in looking for 

 any given date. If the day named be not Ahau itself, it is made relative to it by the 

 odd days of the chuen count, so that the position of that day in the month is always 

 the first thing to be ascertained. 



I have put Ik at the head of the days because it is nearest to Kan of any of the 

 Archaic dominicals, and because the Oaxacan calendar shows a tendency toward 

 retrogression in the order of the days. There is no good reason, however, why any of 

 the other dominicals may not have been the first. In fact, the frequent and peculiar 

 use of Caban in the inscriptions and its standing as the unit of the numeral series 

 constituted by the day symbols would appear to go far toward justifying an assumption 

 that it was the initial day; but the former circumstance may be only a chance 

 happening, and the latter may attach to the remote pre-Archaic era when the year 

 began with the month Chen ; so that neither of these considerations, nor the significant 

 recurrence of Manik in certain places, has had weight enough to induce me to change 

 the order originally adopted ; nor will it be worth while to alter it until some style 

 of reckoning from the beginning of the annual calendar is discovered not in harmony 

 with the present arrangement. 



For all ordinary purposes the point of beginning is of no importance, since the 

 annual calendar is only an orderly rotation of the days until each of them with 

 the same numeral has occupied the seventy-three places allotted to it in the year — 

 20x13 = 260x73 = 18,980 days, or 52 years — when the same succession begins anew. 

 From this it will be seen that unless a count by sub-calendar periods be discovered 

 the matter of its beginning is of no consequence, apart from the satisfaction we 

 experience at any definite knowledge. 



The plan of numerating the days of the month is explained in a preceding section. 



BIOL. CENTK.-AMER., ArchlEol. 



