The use of bead money continued well into the period when the Pomo and their neighbours had access to American dollars. Rates of exchange varied around $5 or $10, sometimes less, per yard of strung beads.
After about the 1920s, the beads’ function as money was lost, but beads did not cease to be made. Techniques evolved continuously; foot-powered grindstones were adopted, and drills powered by flywheels. Later, metal drills replaced the old stone ones. In the twenty-first century, some bead makers have adopted power tools: electric drills to perforate the beads and high-powered presses to shape them.
Like the Yup’ik far to the north, the Pomo wove counting into the texture of their lives, by adopting counting practices based on a combination of words and physical counters. They took the manufacture and exchange of counters to a high level of sophistication, arriving at a general-purpose money with only a handful of parallels elsewhere in the world.
Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil: The long count
Oxwitik, 9.15.5.0.0 10 Ahau 8 Ch’en (22 July, 736 CE). Heir to three hundred years of the city’s tradition, Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil, thirteenth ruler, divine lord, presides over the dedication of a new monument. Standing at the northern end of a 300-metre plaza that already contains one cycle of stelae, it will inaugurate a new series, binding heaven and earth, marking time and asserting the king’s lordship over it.
The stone is 4 metres high, the glyphs of its inscription up to 30 centimetres wide. The inscription calls it a ‘tree stone’. It specifies the date by saying that there are nine baktuns, fifteen katuns, five tuns, zero uinals, and zero kin completed; that the almanac day is 10 Ahau and that a certain god was lord of the night, while the position within the year is 8 Ch’en.
More than just a text, the inscription gives the date in a most elaborate visual form, each number represented by a humanoid figure and each unit of time by an animal that the person must carry: three birds, a toad, a monkey. The personified numbers employ tump lines, bands of cloth tied around the head, to bear the loads. They look like a row of porters in a caravan: merchants or pilgrims. Time, here, is a burden that the gods of number must laboriously carry through history; the stone is their resting place, where they can let their burdens fall.
Or some of them. Number five will be replaced by number six after this day, in time’s great relay; but the personified numbers fifteen and nine will walk much further before their successors take over. The interlocking cycles of time are large indeed.
The Long Count at Copan.
A. P. Maudslay, Archaeology-Biologia Centrali-Americana (London 1889–1902), vol. 1, plate 48. Public domain.
The city of Oxwitik was part of the Mayan world: a network of highland and lowland city states linked by trade, by competition and conflict, by shared or related languages and by shared assumptions and rituals. Speakers of Mayan languages lived across the Yucatan Peninsula, and in what are now Guatemala, Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. It was another abundant set of environments, and one of the handful of places in the world to have developed agriculture without outside influence. There were people living here perhaps 12,000 years ago; complex stratified societies by the start of the first century CE.
This is also one of the few places to have developed writing independently. Mesoamerica had at least three distinct traditions of logographs by the final centuries BCE; the relationship between them is poorly understood. By the third century CE, Mayan cities bore increasingly elaborate inscriptions on their monuments and buildings. The uses of text in this world were mainly for what might be called the propaganda or even the self-advertisement of the ruling elite: by contrast with early scripts in the Near East and East Asia, administrative and bookkeeping functions were strikingly absent. Not just carved on public monuments but painted on walls, fashioned in stucco or incised in pottery and even jewellery, the written messages highlighted key dates in the lives of rulers and cities: births, deaths, conquests, and the founding of cities. Writing that doubled as decoration was always capable of taking a wide range of forms, and artistic elaboration played a part in increasing the number of distinct glyphs: perhaps four hundred were in use at any one time, some standing for whole words and others for individual sounds.
Tantalising archaeological finds suggest there were also books, made of bark or animal hide folded concertina-fashion. They are depicted on pottery, and are occasionally found dissolved and unreadable in graves, but none survive in a legible state from the classic Maya period.
As well as symbols for words, the Maya had symbols for numbers, and they are justly famous for their seeming obsession with complex calendrical information, witnessed in many of their inscriptions. Many cultures have counted days, but few if any have counted them with the panache and sophistication of the classical Maya.
The Mayan languages had distinct words for the numbers from 1 to 12, and they formed the subsequent -teens as compounds with ‘ten’. In the related modern language of Yucatec, numbers from 1 to 5 are hun, caa, ox, can, hoo, while 10 is lahun and 13 – for instance – oxlahun. From twenty upwards, the counting words worked purely in base 20, and it is likely that there were words for both 400 and 8,000. Underlying meanings relating to ‘person’ for 20 and ‘sack’ for 8,000 have been reported, reflecting the full count of fingers and toes and the contents of a sack of cacao beans. Beans, or small stones, may have been used on the Mayan counting boards described by much later sources in Spanish, but no archaeological evidence for them has been found.
And of course, there were number symbols as part of the Mayan script. A dot meant 1, and could be repeated up to four times. A bar meant 5 and was repeated up to three times; bars and dots in combination thus counted as high as 19, the limit of this part of the system. (As with other counting technologies elsewhere in the world, no element in the system was repeated beyond the subitising limit of four times.) Like other glyphs, the number signs could be used as syllables, and they also appear in the names of divinities – ‘nine strides’, ‘ten sky’. Their use as syllables, indeed, resulted in Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil’s name being read for some time by archaeologists as ‘18 rabbit’.
Their main use, though, was in the Mayan calendar. Or rather calendars, for there were several, and they interlocked to evoke the vastness of time to an unparalleled degree. There were twenty names for days: imix, ik, akbal … These were crossed with the numbers from 1 to 13 to give an almanac cycle of 260 days, each specified by a unique combination of name and number. This system was already present in pre-Mayan texts of the first millennium BCE, and possible explanations for its unusual length range across astronomical phenomena and the duration of a human pregnancy, or possibly the length of the Mesoamerican agricultural season.
Next, and quite independently of the 260-day calendar, the year was built up from eighteen named months, each with twenty days, plus a sub-month of five days, making a total of 365 days. This, too, was an ancient system, and it provided a second way to name any given day within its cycle.
Third and finally, a neater year of just eighteen months – 360 days – known as the tun, was used as the basis for specifying dates in the so-called ‘long count’ calendar. Tun were grouped in twenties (katuun); katuun were grouped in twenties too (baktun). From a start date placed in the mythic past, the Maya could specify any day by giving the number of baktun, katuun, tun, months and days that had passed. This system was quite specific to the Maya, and indeed strongly associated with the classical period from roughly 300 to 900 CE (in Mayan terms, from 8 baktun 12 tun to 10 baktun 4 tun).
Many Mayan inscriptions began by naming the date in all three of these ways; like that on the stela at Oxwitik, dedicated on a day identified as long count 9.15.5.0.0, almanac day 10 Ahau and year day 8 Ch’en. With three different cycles in play, of 260, 360 and 365 days, there were many different possiblities for anniversaries and commemorations. It turns out, for instance, that fifty-two long years make exactly seventy-three repetitions of the almanac cycle, and this so-called calendar round was carefully observed as an anniversary. Meanwhile, it was of particular interest if the almanac day matched that of a previous event being commemorated. Furthermore, new years and the ends of katuun and baktun were treated as special anniversaries (very roughly like decades and centuries in the Western decimal count of years); half and quarter katuun were also observed in some cities.
When recording an end-of-cycle date, the final two or three number ‘slots’ in the long count date were necessarily empty, and the Maya used their sign for the adjective ‘no’ to meet the need: ‘there were 9 baktun, 15 katun, 5 tun, no months and no days’. The sign was therefore functioning as something like a zero in the dating system: one of the world’s rather few independent inventions of a symbol for zero.
There was something exuberant about the Mayan counts of days within the various cycles, and in many of the Mayan inscriptions the abundance of their numerical information was augmented by providing still more information beyond the three basic counts. Some gave the day’s position in a nine-day cycle of ‘lords of the night’; some specified the age of the moon and the length of the current lunar month: either twenty-eight or twenty-nine days in the conventionalised calendar for such things. Some mentioned yet another calendar, totalling 819 days. Others referred to dates in the mythic past that lay before the zero date of the long count: that is, during a putative previous long count which had totalled thirteen baktun. Others again evoked the far distant future, using rare glyphs for multiples like pictun (8,000 tun), calabtun (160,000 tun), kinchiltun (3,200,000 tun), and alautun (64,000,000,000 tun). One stela continued this series of ever-larger time units to twenty-four iterations: a count of years that would fill thirty-one figures in a decimal representation.
It is thanks to this near-obsession with dedicating and dating, commemorating and counting, that the history of sites like Oxwitik – now called Copán – is well understood today. Nestled in a valley at about 900 metres and watered by the Copán river, it occupied a pocket of rich agricultural land and relied heavily on maize farming. Occupied by non-Maya people as early as 1400 BCE, it was taken over in 426 CE by a new, Mayan ruler, installed by the nearby city of Tikal. This outsider king busily erected buildings and monuments, and founded a dynasty that would last for seventeen generations, eventually ruling over a population of perhaps 20,000.
His successors created temples, plazas, open-air altars, ceremonial ball courts and a complex of royal residences at Oxwitik, a group of monumental buildings whose impact was immediate and spectacular. They diverted the river, and they commissioned some of the richest and most distinctive sculpture of the Mayan period. As in other Mayan cities, society became steadily more stratified and production more specialised, with plants, animals, trees and mineral resources all exploited and traded across the region. At different times seashells, greenstone beads, cacao beans and copper bells were all used as money. The city’s pottery became a prized export.
Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil (his name may mean ‘Eighteen are the Images of K’awil’) took the throne in July 695 (specifically, 9.13.3.6.8, 7 Ahau, 1 Mol). Over several decades, he built temples, a tomb for his predecessor and father, and a huge court for the ceremonial Mayan ball game. And he commissioned a remarkable series of stelae for the main plaza of Oxwitik. Each depicted the king performing a ritual, perhaps engaged in trance, accompanied by supernatural beings; each was adorned with a text giving its date and the dates of the acts of ancestors or divinities which it echoed and commemorated. Together, they turned the great plaza into something like a sacred space.
A first series of six stelae was completed by 9.15.0.0.0 (22 August 731); five years later, the king began a new set. The new stela at the northern end of the plaza bore sculpture of fantastic beauty and complexity, portraying the king masked and accoutred for ritual and flanked by eight manifestations of a single god. The side bearing the inscription gave the date using not the dot-and-bar number symbols of many Mayan inscriptions, but an alternative system. Each number up to 12 (including zero) was associated with one of the gods who were used to name the days in the almanac. For numbers between 13 and 19, the ten and the smaller number were combined into a single figure, echoing the structure of the Mayan number words.
This list of gods (specifically, the set of pictures of their heads) was a common way of writing numbers, second only to the bar-and-dot symbols. It was capable of huge artistic elaboration, and on occasion the gods could be depicted as complete anthropomorphic figures; this was how they appeared on the new stela. Combined with the set of zoomorphic divinities associated with the different units of time, the result was a complex, naturalistic scene of number-gods carrying time units. One of the pinnacles of Mayan sculpture, it is among the most elaborate and beautiful of all visions of counting.
If the king was the owner of time and the controller of ritual, he was also the monopolistic wielder of force, both in the form of the labour used to build temples, monuments and the rest, and in the form of war waged on his neighbours, in a continual jockeying for control of resources, trade, tribute and prestige. The Mayan kingdoms were never unified into a single state, and they spent much of their energy in strife against one another.
Fifty kilometres to the north of Oxwitik lay Quiringa, apparently a client or a tributary city. Its new king was inaugurated in 724 CE under the supervision of Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil. Over the following decade, something went wrong with this relationship: aggression on one part or the other, or a desire for independence by the ruler of Quiringa. Possibly with help from another larger city in the region, king K’ak’ Tiliw Chan Yopaat of Quiringa succeded in capturing Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil. On 3 May 738, he beheaded him.
Naturally, there are monuments at both cities giving the date. At Oxwitik the description states that the king’s ‘breath expired in war’ and lamented that the city now had ‘no pyramid, no altar, no cave’: that building work was at a standstill, as was ritual access to the underworld. The defeat was felt almost as a cosmic disaster.
There would be four more kings at Oxwitik, but the ninth century was a period of decline across the whole Maya world, for reasons that probably included both internal tensions and overexploitation of the environment. Populations declined, dynasties collapsed, cities were abandoned. Oxwitik never really recovered from its disaster, and the last king was dead by 820. Buildings crumbled, and the river channel shifted, cutting a swathe through the ruins. By the tenth century the whole valley was abandoned.
A few Mayan books from the tenth to the twelfth century survive, giving a vivid sense that astronomical and calendrical information was still being transmitted, centuries after the peak of Maya culture. The 260-day almanac cycle was retained for centuries (it is reportedly still in use today), but the long count was gradually abandoned. Dates came to be given in a simplified form, stating the number of katun but omitting the largest unit, the baktun. This was a system that would repeat every 256 years.
The bar-and-dot numerals were also abandoned, although further south in the Andes the Mixtec and Aztec cultures would adopt related systems and transform them for their own uses. One consequence of these changes is a lasting uncertainty about how exactly the classical Mayan calendar correlated with calendars elsewhere in the world: which day of the Western calendar corresponded to its start. It was around 11 August 3114 BCE, but corrections of one or two days have been proposed from time to time, and certainty is elusive.
