The Americas and Time Keeping

Indigenous Science Practices

What is time?

FFW (5 min): What is time, and how do you measure it without a watch or clock? For example, how do some periods of your life "feel" to you now, looking back (childhood, etc)? WHY do you think this is?

Mesoamerica

The historic region of Mesoamerica comprises the modern day countries of northern Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Belize, and central to southern Mexico. For thousands of years, this area was populated by groups such as the Olmec, Zapotec, Maya, Toltec, and Aztec peoples.

Let’s recap the history of science so far: systematic knowledge-making has probably occurred as long as humans have been around. Unfortunately, historians rely primarily on written records, and those are only a few thousand years old. Although ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese cultures had writing and useful sciences, we started with classical Greek and Indian cultures that developed systems for understanding the cosmos and all the stuff in it.

Today, we’re going to jump through space to see how other cultures made knowledge at roughly the same time without any contact with the peoples of Africa, Asia, or Europe. This is a story about the planet Venus, breathtaking pyramids, and most of all the question “when are we?” What is time, and how do you measure it? The classical civilizations of Mesoamerica, or what is now Mexico and Central America, didn’t “leave behind” as many paper sources as those of the Indian or Greco-Roman linguistic worlds… Because after CE 1500, Spanish imperialists destroyed those records. Of all the Mayan books made of folded-up bark cloth—called codies—only four survive today.

Annotations and Taking Notes

• As we watch, please follow text in your transcript

• Highlight information you feel is MOST important (do not highlight everything)

  1. people

  2. places

  3. events

  4. cause and effect

  5. vocabulary

• Share out what stood out to you - everyone

• Write notes in your notebook from your annotated transcript

• Upload handwritten notes into Google Classroom assignment to receive credit

Reflection: What did we learn today?