Mayan Calendars

Today keeping track of time is crucial for everyday life and it has been since the very first calendars were created. The Mayan people based their calendar on astronomy. The Romans created their calendar keeping religious holidays in mind. Other cultures used their calendars to keep track of celestial events. Different groups of people created calendars to indicate the passing of time and events within their cultures. The Mayans are an ancient culture that used to reside in the South Americas. Recently there was an excavation at a Maya site in Guatemala. “Scrawled in red and black are charts of numbers represented by bars and dots in the typical Maya fashion. After examining the figures, experts realized they denoted time spans corresponding to cycles of the Mayan calendar,” (Source 3). “ ‘This was a calculator, so to speak, for a calendar priest or a Maya astronomer to calculate moon ages,’ ”
Some of these groups include the Ice-age Hunters, the Sumerians, and England, who was responsible for Stonehenge. “Ice-age hunters in Europe over 20,000 years ago scratched lines and gouged holes in sticks and bones, possible counting the days between phases of the moon,” (Source 1). “Five thousand years ago, Sumerians in the Tigris-Euphrates valley in today’s Iraq had a calendar that divided the year into 30 day months, divided the day into 12 periods (each corresponding to 2 of our hours), and divided these periods into 30 parts (each like 4 of our minutes),” (Source 1). “We have no written records of Stonehenge, built over 4000 years ago in England, but its alignments show its purposes apparently included the determination of seasonal or celestial events, such as lunar eclipses, solstices, and so on,” (Source1). All three of these culture groups created their calendars with the intention to use them to keep track of celestial events and the passing of