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Le Plongeon was born on the island of Jersey on May 4, 1825. He attended and graduated from Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. After graduation, at the age of 19, he sailed to South America and was caught in a shipwreck off the coast of Chile. While there he settled in Valparaiso and taught mathematics, drawing, and languages at a local college. In 1849, news of the California gold rush reached him, and he sailed to San Francisco to work as a surveyor, and also apprenticed to became a doctor of medicine. One of his accomplishments as a surveyor included drawing a plan for the layout of th ...

Read more here: » Augustus Le Plongeon: Encyclopedia II - Augustus Le Plongeon - Early life and careers

By the 1880s, while other Mayanists fully accepted that the Maya post-dated Ancient Egypt, Le Plongeon refused to yield to the new findings. He stood by his years of field and archival studies, and challenged those he considered "armchair" archaeologists to debate the issues. But the chronology and evidence against cultural diffusion was overwhelming, and he very quickly found himself ignored, his theories condemned to the fringe of the new profession. He was never fully recognized for his work in the Yucatán, but his over five hundr ...

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Morley graduated from Harvard in 1908. The next six years he spent travelling through Central America and Mexico, engaged in fieldwork with the School of American Archaeology. This period coincided with the First World War, and Morley's activities in the region now appear to have been largely a cover for the gathering of intelligence and reporting on the movements of German operatives in the region, which might have been of interest to the U.S. Government. According to recent investigations

Read more here: » Sylvanus Morley: Encyclopedia II - Sylvanus Morley - First expeditions and espionage work

Sylvanus G. Morley was born in Chester, Pennsylvania[1]. After first studying civil engineering, he went on to attend Harvard University as an undergraduate. Whilst there his interest in archaeology was sparked by the arrival in 1904 at the University of a collection of Maya artefacts[2] which had been recovered by Edward Herbert Thompson from a cenote n ...

Read more here: » Sylvanus Morley: Encyclopedia II - Sylvanus Morley - Early life

Many a Maya scholar and archaeologist were to be given their first opportunity and employment under Morley's tutelage, working on the various Carnegie projects. Of these, perhaps the two most notable were J. Eric S. Thompson and Tatiana Proskouriakoff. Thompson would shortly become the field's most dominant figure and its uncontested expert; together with Morley, he would be most responsible for promulgating the view of the ancient Maya as peaceable astronomers, obsessed with time and calendric observations. This view would become the prevai ...

Read more here: » Sylvanus Morley: Encyclopedia II - Sylvanus Morley - Influences on other scholars

Morley was to devote the next 18 years working in the Maya region, overseeing the seasonal archaeological digs and restoration projects, returning to the United States in the off-season to give a series of lectures on his finds. Although primarily involved with the work at Chichen Itza, Morley also took on responsibilities which extended Carnegie-sponsored fieldwork to other Maya sites, such as Yaxchilan, Coba, Copán, Quiriguá, Uxmal, Naranjo, Seibal and Uaxactun. Morley is credited as having rediscovered the last of these sites (located i ...

Read more here: » Sylvanus Morley: Encyclopedia II - Sylvanus Morley - Fieldwork in Mexico and Central America

The tzolk'in calendar combines a cycle of twenty named days with another cycle of thirteen numbers (the trecena), to produce 260 unique days (i.e., 20 × 13 = 260). Each successive named day was numbered from 1 up to 13 and then starting again at 1. There were 20 individual named days, as shown in the table below: NOTES: 1. the sequence number of the named day in the Tzolk'in calendar 2. Day name, in the standardised and revised orthography of the Guatemalan Academia de Lenguas Mayas 3.

Read more here: » Tzolkin: Encyclopedia II - Tzolkin - Tzolk'in table of named days

There were many such books in existence at the time of the Spanish conquest of Yucatán in the 16th century, but they were destroyed in bulk by the Conquistadors and priests soon after. In particular, all those in Yucatán were ordered destroyed by Bishop Diego de Landa in July of 1562. Such codices were primary written records of Maya civilization, together with the many inscriptions on stone monuments and stelae which survive to the present day. However, their range of subject matter in all likelihood differed significantly from the topics ...

Read more here: » Maya codices: Encyclopedia II - Maya codices - Background

Mayanists have bestowed the name tzolkin (or tzolk'in, in the revised orthography which is now preferred) on the Maya version of the Mesoamerican 260-day calendar. The word was coined based on the Yucatec language, with an intended meaning of "count of days". The actual names of this calendar as used by the pre-Columbian Maya are not known. The Aztec calendar equivalent was called by them t ...

Read more here: » Maya calendar: Encyclopedia II - Maya calendar - Tzolk'in

Given the rarity and importance of these books, rumors of finding new ones often develop interest. Archaeological excavations of Maya sites have turned up a number of rectangular lumps of plaster and paint flakes, most commonly in elite tombs. These lumps are the remains of codices where all the organic material has rotted away. A few of the more coherent of these lumps have been preserved, with the slim hope that some technique to be developed by future generations of archaeologists may be able to recover some information from these remains of ancient pages. ...

Read more here: » Maya codices: Encyclopedia II - Maya codices - Other Maya codices

Le Plongeon started full time research on the Maya civilization, and pioneered the use of photography as a tool for his studies. He began using the wet collodion glass-plate negative process he used for studio portraits to record his exploration. He traveled extensively all over Peru for eight years visiting and photographing the ancient ruins. In 1870, he left Peru and traveled back once again to San Francisco where he gave a number of illustrated lectures at the California Academy of Sciences on Peruvian archaeology and the causes o ...

Read more here: » Augustus Le Plongeon: Encyclopedia II - Augustus Le Plongeon - Travels in Peru