2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
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HSS ABSTRACTS
The following abstracts for HSS sessions appear as they were submitted, with some
minor exceptions. Due to space limitations, paragraph breaks within each abstract
were eliminated. Also, some submissions were difficult to read and some words may
have been inadvertently altered. To promote accuracy, the abstracts were posted on
the society’s Web site, and authors were encouraged to check that their original wording
survived intact. The varying length of the abstracts is due to the fact that some authors
exceeded the space allotted on the paper proposal form. Authors were encouraged to
limit their abstracts to 250 words or less. The History of Science Society also requests
that future presenters to use the Society Web site to submit their paper proposals. This
saves time for all involved. We thank the organizers, presenters, commentators, and
all those involved whose work ensures the success of the annual meeting.
Gerardo␣ V. Aldana Harvard University
Re-Creation in Classic Maya Times:
Astronumerology and Secret Knowledge in Kan Balam’s Court
Despite the fact that the calendric and mathematical elements of ancient Maya
knowledge were the first-understood of their intellectual achievements and that
the bulk of this material was deciphered by the early decades of this century, the
extent of an “History of Mayan Astronomy” remains one paragraph in Floyd
Lounsbury’s 1978 Dictionary of Scientific Biography entry. This is particularly
unfortunate for the history of science as a discipline since Maya culture allows
for serious consideration of the question of ‘science’ in a ‘non-Western’ culture.
This paper constitutes a first attempt at precisely this type of investigation by
examining a development in Mayan astronomy in which mathematical innovation
complemented political necessity. That is, Kan Balam II, heir to the throne of
Palenque during the seventh century A.D., faced a legitimation crisis with the
recent demise of two allies, Tikal and Teotihuacan. To ensure a trouble-free
accession he developed an analogy between his immediate family and the mythic
first family of Creation. This analogy he presented in monumental architecture,
palatial art, and the astrology of his court. The latter was possible because earlier
that century, one of his father’s court astrologers had discovered how to compute
the positions of the planets in their arithmetic cycles for periods of thousands of
years. This astrologer then was able to correlate the events of the mythic past
into the Long Count calendar relative to contemporary times. Such a feat enabled
Kan Balam to tie his own ceremonies numerologically to those of the gods.
Simultaneously, this feat opens up for us a window into the Maya
conceptualization of time and the celestial bodies that cannot be adequately
captured by ‘Western’-derived disciplinary categories. We are thus forced, I
argue, to reconsider our understandings of “Other” cultures as well as that of
pre-modern European culture.