Read Online The 2012 Story by John Major Jenkins - Free Book Online

that is dated 13.0.0.0.0 in the Long Count—the end of the previous 13-Baktun cycle—but he didn’t seem to apply the same logic to the site of Quiriguá. This era base is documented by Goodman in his book as the beginning of a great cycle, a period of 13 Baktuns. He knew how many days one of these Creation cycles would consist of, because he figured out the values the Maya ascribed to the five place values in the Long Count. A great cycle of 13 Baktuns would thus consist of 1,872,000 days, or 5125.36 years.
    But the big question that remained unsolved in Goodman’s 1897 book was the correlation. All of the Long Count periods in his charts were free floating—no one knew how the Long Count dates should be correlated to a time frame we, with our Gregorian calendar, could relate to. Goodman had noted that many of the dates occurred during the period of the 9th Baktun, but when was this? Before Christ? After Christ? Fifth century AD or fifteenth century BC? Archaeologists did not yet have carbon-14 dating at their disposal, so the challenge of figuring out the correlation had to begin by drawing from historical documents compiled during the Conquest.
    Goodman, like other investigators of the correlation question, drew from the Historia of Diego de Landa, where Katun periods in the Long Count were recorded. Charles Bowditch, in a 1901 article, made use of another Yucatec document, the Books of Chumayel, translated by Daniel Brinton. Bowditch’s attempt to fix the correlation was inconclusive, but suggested that the earliest date from Copán would probably correspond to 34 AD—hundreds of years earlier than what is now accepted.
    Goodman determined that the important Great Cycle period must consist of 13 Baktuns, not 20, based on the 13.0.0.0.0 date recorded at Quiriguá. This assertion rankled scholars such as Cyrus Thomas, who wanted to preserve an elegant symmetry in the Long Count system, which operated on a base-20 principle. It was thus believed that the Baktun level should toggle to zero after 20 Baktuns were completed, rather than 13. Goodman, surely, must be fooling himself. In the end, archaeology has proven Goodman correct, for we have no Creation Texts dated with 20 Baktuns, but many dated with 13. This illustrates how scholars sometimes invoke the appearance of logic to oust the facts of the matter and dismiss the better-informed conclusions of an outsider.
    By 1905 Goodman had published an innocuous paper called “Maya Dates” in American Anthropologist. The correlation he worked out placed the beginning of the current 13-Baktun cycle in August of 3114 BC, though this wasn’t explicitly stated. In fact, his conclusions are strangely obscure and could be noticed only by those few scholars who were familiar with the language and issues of the correlation debate. This could very well be one reason why Goodman’s contribution sank into obscurity and was easily upstaged by Sylvanus Morley’s paper of 1910, which presented a correlation 260 years earlier than Goodman’s. Maya archaeologist Herbert Spinden became a supporter of Morley’s correlation, which added more fuel to that fire. The issue is, of course, essential to the 2012 topic because it determines the placement of the 13-Baktun cycle-ending date. December 21, 2012 (the 13-Baktun cycle-ending date), is a consequence of Goodman’s work. In terms of the Long Count calendar and the Maya Creation Mythology, the date is important because it signifies the end of a World Age, a chapter or phase of humanity.
    Other proposed correlations had the backing of consensus and Goodman, although correct, did not engage the debate to advance his insight. There is no defense by Goodman on record that I know of. In the Peabody Archive of his papers, an unpublished manuscript of 1908 called “Annual, perpetual, chronological calendar analyses” may provide charts for the Long Count anchored to his correlation. We might find there the very first conscious recognition