A Count That Was Never Interrupted

The remarkable thing about this cycle is that it is still being kept. Day keepers in the Guatemalan highlands, among them K'iche', Mam and Ixil communities, maintain the count, mark its days, and are consulted about them, and the sequence they keep can be checked against dates recorded in colonial documents and back through those to the ancient inscriptions. The line is unbroken across the conquest, the colonial period and the twentieth century. The count's uses are personal as much as ceremonial.

A person may be named for the day they were born on and understood to carry something of its character; days are chosen or avoided for particular undertakings; and the office of day keeper is entered through a training and a calling rather than assumed. Anthropological work in the highlands has described the practice in detail, including its transmission and the reasoning day keepers themselves give for it. That living practice was largely absent from the international discussion of Maya calendars around the turn of the millennium, which concerned a different count and a terminal date that this cycle does not have. The atlas records the two separately, and notes that the communities keeping the count were not the ones making the predictions.