A trio of researchers from the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the University of Arizona, and Colgate University has found examples of Mesoamerican structures aligned for use as a 260-day calendar, built thousands of years ago along Mexico's gulf coast.
In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, Ivan Šprajc, Takeshi Inomata and Anthony Aveni describe how aircraft-based LIDAR allowed them to see the alignment of the ancient structures. They also discuss how these structures could have been used by ancient cultures.
Prior research has shown that ancient people living in Mesoamerica had developed and used a 260-day calendar as far back as 300 to 200 B.C. The written evidence was found on plaster mural fragments.
But since that discovery, researchers have suspected that such a calendar had been developed long before the people using it developed a means of writing it down. In this new effort, the researchers found evidence of such a calendar made thousands of years earlier using large structures.
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