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Telling Time with the Moon in the Americas
Stanislaw Iwaniszewski
National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico City
Like in other parts of the world, the observations of the recurrent phenomena perceived in the sky served to develop systems of time-reckoning of Native American groups. Though all peoples used natural events and the stars for the determination of time, the observation of the phases of the moon led to the establishment of two types of time-reckoning: the descriptive lunar series and the astronomical lunar series. In a few regions of America the sidereal lunar month was in use.
More complex lunar time-reckoning systems were developed by the Classic Maya sky watchers who grouped the moons in series of six and/or eighteen differentiated lunations. The system served to compute the phases of the moon, both backward and forward in time, rather, though in several cases it stemmed from the actual observations. A variant of this system served to predict eclipses.
In the whole continent the observations of moon phases were carefully observed and used to mark the cycles of plant growth, and systems of time reckoning based on the moon served to schedule the periods suitable for planting and harvesting.
Stanislaw Iwaniszewski is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Postgraduate Studies in Archaeology at the National School of Anthropology and History at Mexico City, which is one of the centers of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, the main Mexican institution engaged in research and administration of Mexican cultural heritage. Professor Iwaniszewski is also the Senior Keeper at the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw, Poland. In addition he is the President of the International Society for Archaeoastronomy and Astronomy in Culture (ISAAC).
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