Word: spinden
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...Herbert J. Spinden, '06. Assistant Curator of the Peabody Museum, and Gregory Mason, writer and explorer, will lead an expedition which will search for records of the ancient Mayas in Yucatan, it was announced last night...
...Spinden was Assistant Curator of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York from 1909 to 1921, and since then has been Curator of Mexican Archaeology and Ethnology at the Peabody Museum of the University. He has made 14 expeditions to Central America gathering material which has led to the recovery of much ancient history and science. His book "Maya Art" was awarded the Prix Anguand by the French government. On December 27, 1925, Harvard announced that Dr. Spinden had solved the mystery of the Venus Calendar of the Mayas by which the ancient inhabitants of Yucatan...
Central America. The earliest dates in New World history were definitely determined and the chronology of the Mayan calendar solved by Dr. Herbert J. Spinden, of the Peabody Museum, Harvard. The historical first day of the Mayas was Aug. 6,613 B. C. (by our calendar), from which point a numerical record of elapsed days was kept and astronomical events were recorded accurately. On Dec. 10,580 B. C., the perfected calendar was formally inaugurated and functioned without loss of a single day until the Mayan records were destroyed by the Spanish Inquisition in Yucatan, in 1561 A. D. These...
...Spinden explained, the calendar which the Mayans invented, on the basis of records collected by such methods, used several ingenious systems of identifying days quite different from ours. A very troublesome difficulty arose from the fact that the Mayans never dropped leap year days; consequently, their natural year did not always begin on the same calendar day. Dr. Spinden's final solution is too complicated to describe in a few words, since it rests on a great number of coincidences between recorded astronomical events in the Mayan and Gregorian calendars...
...Mayans invented their system about 613 B. C." Dr. Spinden said, "We know this from the fact that the names of the months, like the "rainy month," signifying the usual weather conditions accord in that period with the known seasonal variations. For 33 years the Mayans tested and perfected their system, and in 580 B.C. it was formally inaugurated." The Mayan era, beginning in that year antedates by almost 300 years the era of Scleucus the oldest known era of recorded time in th old world...