A Lunar Day Count at Monte Alban and the Chronology of Early and Middle Preclassic Zapotec Hieroglyphic Texts (ca. 496–221 BCE)

Abstract This article identifies a lunar day count in Zapotec inscriptions at Monte Alban. The lunar records that are accompanied by dates in the Mesoamerican 52-year cycle make it possible to determine intervals between recorded events. Seven placements of the resulting series of intervals in absolute time are consistent with dates of the lunar crescent’s first visibility at Monte Alban between 650 and 50 BCE; just one is also consistent with the seventeenth-century Zapotec calendar. The data show that Zapotec divinatory calendar dates likely began around noon, as in the sixteenth century, and that the return of the year-bearer on the year’s 261st day was celebrated in the afternoon by 222 BCE.