Dr Adrian Chase

speaker

354 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 6 Aug

Dr Adrian Chase’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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Dan Snow's History Hit · The Rise of the Ancient Maya · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

So the Maya calendar, like the Maya number system, it happens in these sort of sets of 20.

And you can imagine 20 as the base unit instead of 10 if you count on fingers and toes.

And so they have 20 days in a month.

They only have 18 in a year to help make that religious calendar kind of work out, if that makes sense.

And then 20 years in a set, and then every set of...

400 years, 20 times 20, etc.

And so there was this concept that the calendar repeats.

And part of this idea of counting in cycles, so you've got the cycle of days, the cycle of sort of weeks and months, the cycles of years, is the Maya are thinking about time not as an arrow, but as cycles on cycles, whether it's day-night, rainy-dry, generations of people, life-death.

So what happened is that calendric system, that long count calendar, which the Maya weren't really using in the post-classic.

They use a shorter form because they didn't need to have dates that counted, you know, within a 6,000 plus year frame.

As it reset, it started a new count in 2012, in December.

I think 21st it was.

And so that date is the same date as the start of the calendar.

right, in terms of Maya dates.

But because of that one text and a couple others, it's clear that it's just a repetition of the cyclone.

Exactly.

And so they're doing cycles and celebration of time every 20 years.

So you can think of all the public space you've walked through, all this flat space.

It's big enough for at least 71,000 people to be tightly packed.

And if you had a procession going through, you can imagine once every 20 years, there's a big ceremony to celebrate the successful governance, rule, passage of time of 20 years.

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