Abstract
The Mayas, Aztecs and other ancient civilisations of Middle America shared a complex calendar, based on the cyclical combination of 13 numbers and 20 day-signs. The days and different periodisations were associated with world directions, deities, myths, rituals and all kinds of symbolic values, as well as with specific human activities and groups. The calendar was not only the dominant framework for historiography and astronomical observations, but also for divination, medical treatment, ritual performance, community organisation and moral codes. It is an important structuring principle in ancient visual art, inscriptions and books, which to a large extent still elude full interpretation. Some explanations come from authors writing shortly after the Spanish conquest (A.D. 1521), but these give a generalised, incomplete and biased picture. A wealth of additional and very relevant information is to be found in the on-going use of this calendar by "daykeepers" (specialists in traditional healing and other rituals) in present-day indigenous communities in Southern Mexico and Guatemala. But, so far, little attention has been paid to this fascinating form of cultural continuity. This is alarming as the local knowledge of this ancient symbolic system is rapidly giving way to modernisation and globalisation. The research programme proposed here will drastically expand the empirical data-set through much-needed ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork. It will reconstruct the calendar as a cognitive system and examine how it was, and to some extent still is, embodied, socially embedded, and ritually performed. As well as mapping the linguistic, narrative, ritual and intercultural dimensions of the surviving calendar, this programme will contribute to the theoretical reflection on the role of perceptions and conceptualisations of time in the construction of individual and collective identities, and how this role is affected by (and, in turn, influences) a situation of intense cultural interaction.