A mathematical construction of the 260 day mesoamerican calendar based on archaeoastronomical alignments

TL;DR

This paper presents a mathematical model for the 260-day Mesoamerican calendar, linking it to astronomical principles and archaeoastronomical alignments, revealing its relation to Earth's orbital motion and proposing new calendar counts.

Contribution

It introduces a mathematical construction of the 260-day calendar based on arithmetic and astronomical relations, connecting it to Kepler's third law and archaeoastronomical alignments.

Findings

The 260-day calendar relates to Earth's orbital period via Kepler's third law.

Approximate calendar counts of 364 and 360 days are derived with fundamental numbers 13 and 18.

Two types of archaeoastronomical alignments are defined and analyzed.

Abstract

Ancient mesoamerican cultures built a short ritual 260 day calendar and used it for daily routinary life. Using simple arithmetic calculations it is first shown that by forcing the introduction of the the fundamental number 13 to calculate days in a calendar, a 364 day count can be built and from this, the short mesoamerican calendar of 260 days is constructed. It is also shown that the basic mesoamerican relation between the full solar 365 day calendar and the short one of 260 days given by: 365 x 52 = 260 x 73 is Kepler's third law of orbital motion between Earth's period of time about the Sun and an imaginary synodic orbit with a 260 day period. Based on this basic mesoamerican relation and a general definition of an archaeoastronomical alignment, a full mathematical definition of a short calendar count is made. For particular cases, approximate calendar counts of 364 and 360 days are obtained with fundamental numbers 13 and 18 associated to each one respectively. The extra days required for this approximate calendar counts are a given solstice day for the former, and 4 plus 1 (the given solstice day) for the latter, generating the 5 nemontemi days used by ancient mesoamerican cultures. Motivated by an extended mesoamerican relation, two types of archaeoastronomical alignments are defined and their consequences are investigated. These Type-A and Type-B archaeoastronomical alignments motivate the introduction of extended fundamental or monad fractions that partition the approximate and short counts.