Abstract

This paper explores how ancient Mayan calendar specialists designed a predictive eclipse table, revising a century of interpretation. The table’s length, 405 months, was originally implemented in a general lunar calendar table of 405 successive months; within a few passes through this lunar calendar, intervals among observed eclipses could have stimulated an approximation to the series of lunar intervals that were later compiled as stations of an eclipse table; and for all and only these lunar stations to correspond to dates of upcoming eclipses, dates in successive 405-month eclipse tables would have to have overlapped. It identifies optimal procedures for the amounts of overlap that would maintain its predictions’ correctness and shows that these procedures could yield a sequence of tables that would anticipate every solar eclipse observable in the Mayan territory from a century or two after the first evidence of the Mayan lunar calendar to at least the era of the extant eclipse table, 700 years later.

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