A Maya Tropical-Year Agricultural Cult in Naj Tunich Cave, with Dr. Barbara Macleod

Naj Tunich Cave is famous for its Classic-period paintings of dated hieroglyphic texts and human ritualists. Half of these texts were positioned in the last three months of the Maya ha'ab and often named visiting lords from distant cities. The other half were agricultural, featuring rites for the growing and maturing maize, dating between the first solar zenith of early May and the harvest celebration of mid-November, and named local practitioners. The timing and punctuation were exactly as the Swiss ethnographer Rafael Girard has documented for the agrarian season of the Ch'orti' Maya of Guatemala in the mid-20th century.

These rites would have been normal seasonal practice in caves, temples, and in milpas, but in the precarious eighth century, they were also a stress response to the increasingly delayed or scanty rains leading up to that major drought of the Terminal Classic. It was important that high-status lords attend and document them – an otherwise rare phenomenon in caves.
This presentation will offer an introduction to the region, the cave, and its paintings, and will focus on the texts of the agrarian season and its governing astronomy, including a solar tropical-year almanac based on a year of 365.2422 days which determined the intervals between these rituals.

Barbara MacLeod grew up in Missouri and began exploring and mapping caves in her teens, then continued caving around the U.S. for years. From 1971 to 1975 she worked in the Belize Department of Archaeology as a Peace Corps speleologist, documenting Classic Maya cave ritual sites and rescuing artifacts in danger of looting. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Texas/Austin in 1990. For four decades she has been an independent academic and an active contributor to the field of Maya epigraphy. She first visited Naj Tunich Cave in 1987. She has recently (co-)authored articles on Naj Tunich, Piedras Negras Throne 1, Cancuen Panel 1, and several knotty decipherment topics.