Abstract
A great deal is known about colonial Zapotec calendar systems. Every pan-Mesoamerican system was in use: the divinatory/sacred calendar of 260 days, together with its partition into 13- and 20-day subdivisions; the civil year of 365 days and its subdivision into eighteen 20-day months plus a final period of 5 days; and the cycle of 52 years, a permutation of the divinatory and civil calendars. A surprising amount is known about the activities and professional tools and practices of the calendar specialists, and about the ways that calendrical knowledge was transmitted. We have scant information on Zapotec astronomical knowledge and practices, believed to have been in their hands, but an understanding of the timing of eclipses was among their applications of calendrical constructs.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Terrence Kaufman for discussion of etymological issues addressed in this entry, and Michel Oudijk and David Tavárez for discussion of the 52-day cycle annotations.
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Justeson, J. (2015). Colonial Zapotec Calendars and Calendrical Astronomy. In: Ruggles, C. (eds) Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8_61
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6141-8_61
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