Every so often an event comes along and gets the doomsday conspiracy theorist all worked up. This time it is the Maya calendar coming to a close (details bellow). I don’t believe anything will happen on December 21st but if it does we should meet here to plan our next steps. If all is well on December 22nd we should meet to celebrate. Either way I have planned an end of the world boot camp to help us get ready for the end whenever it arrives.
So if we’re still here plan on putting together a small team (2-6 players) give it a team name and come out to brush up on some survival skills.
To survive the end of the world you will need both skill and luck. I have designed three carnival style games that will test your team’s skill. You will also need to locate three caches retrieving an item from each of them. Choosing what you bring back is where the luck comes in.
Just a little friendly competition to get you motivated. All activities will be kid and grandparent friendly.
The event will be at the Mandarin Park in Pavilion #2 from 9:30am to whenever (around 2:00 pm) with lunch around 12:00pm. I will be serving Hamburgers and hot dogs and would ask that everyone bring a side dish to add to the meal. I will also have plenty of water on hand but if you would like some other beverage please bring it with you.
I have received great support from The Cache Station who has agreed to assist with the event by conducting the Raffle and putting together the prizes for the competition.
Maya Calendar Overview
The Maya calendar consists of several cycles or counts of different lengths.
The 260-day count is known to scholars as the Tzolk'in. The Tzolk'in was combined with a 365-day vague solar year known as the Haab to form a synchronized cycle lasting for 52 Haabs called the Calendar Round. Smaller cycles of 13 days (the trecena) and 20 days (the veintena) were important components of the Tzolk'in and Haab' cycles, respectively. The Calendar Round is still in use by many groups in the Guatemalan highlands.
A different calendar was used to track longer periods of time, and for the inscription of calendar dates (i.e., identifying when one event occurred in relation to others). This is the Long Count. It is a count of days since a mythological starting-point.
Since Calendar Round dates repeat every 18,980 days, approximately 52 solar years, the cycle repeats roughly once each lifetime, so a more refined method of dating was needed if history was to be recorded accurately. To specify dates over periods longer than 52 years, Mesoamericans used the Long Count calendar.
The Maya name for a day was k'in. Twenty of these k'ins are known as a winal oruinal. Eighteen winals make one tun. Twenty tuns are known as a k'atun. Twenty k'atuns make a b'ak'tun.
The Long Count calendar identifies a date by counting the number of days from the Mayan creation date 4 Ahaw, 8 Kumk'u (August 11, 3114 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar or September 6 in the Julian calendar). But instead of using a base-10 (decimal) scheme like Western numbering, the Long Count days were tallied in a modified base-20 scheme. Thus 0.0.0.1.5 is equal to 25, and 0.0.0.2.0 is equal to 40. As the Uinal unit resets after only counting to 18, the Long Count consistently uses base-20 only if the tun is considered the primary unit of measurement, not the k'in; with the k'in and Uinal units being the number of days in the tun. The Long Count 0.0.1.0.0 represents 360 days, rather than the 400 in a purely base-20 (vigesimal) count.
There are also four rarely used higher-order cycles: piktun, kalabtun, k'inchiltun, and alautun.
Since the Long Count dates are unambiguous, the Long Count was particularly well suited to use on monuments. The monumental inscriptions would not only include the 5 digits of the Long Count, but would also include the two tzolk'in characters followed by the two haab' characters.
Misinterpretation of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is the basis for a popular belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012. December 21, 2012 is simply the day that the calendar will go to the next b'ak'tun, at Long Count 13.0.0.0.0. The date on which the calendar will go to the next piktun (a complete series of 20b'ak'tuns), at Long Count 1.0.0.0.0.0, will be on October 13, 4772.
Sandra Noble, executive director of the Mesoamerican research organization Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., notes that "for the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle". She considers the portrayal of December 2012 as a doomsday or cosmic-shift event to be "a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in."