The Mesoamerican Calendar

This book explains how a 1566 text from the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa led to a 200-year old misconception about the kind of calendar year used in old Mesoamerica.

It turns out that in the literature about the basic structure of the Mesoamerican calendar, a kind of Julian calendar year of 365 days was always assumed, and still is, to be used. Gradually the question arose how a people on the other side of the world could know in 1000 BC of an artificial European calendar structure that was only invented in 45 BC. After an extensive literature study into the origin and reasons of this assumption, no argument could be found that justified this assumption.

In the end, an incorrect text in a well-known historical source of 1566 AD proved to be the origin for this assumption, which since then has continued to exist as an established fact. Reason to demonstrate on the basis of verifiable facts and arguments that the assumption is based on an incorrect basis and has therefore been wrongly used for years as a fixed fact.