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A Lunar-Solar Year Calendar Stick from North America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Alexander Marshack
Alexander Marshack*
Affiliation:
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138
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Abstract

The microscopic and sequential analysis of an early nineteenth-century American Indian calendar stick documents the notation of a precise, non-arithmetic, observational lunar year of twelve months with the evidence for added, subsidiary months suggesting the use of a thirteenth intercalary month every three years to bring the calendar into phase with the solar tropical year. The calendar stick is the most complex astronomical-calendric, problem-solving device known from the Americas outside of the high Mesoamerican and Andean Civilizations, but it is not derived from these late traditions. The analysis suggests the presence of an underlying observational conceptual base that may have come into the Americas from Asia.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Antiquity , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 1985 , pp. 27 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Archaeology 1985

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References

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