Mayan Calendar
For my final project in my anthropology: art and society class, I was struggling initially with finding a culture and art subject to analyze and recreate. Over the past week I was brainstorming and considering many different options. I finally decided I would recreate a 3D mayan calendar, using plaster or wax.
I have always been interested in the pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas. They seemed to have a very strong motivation to mesh both art and technology or symbolism and function. For example the pyramids they built had many different symbolic meanings that also interacted with the sun during different times of the year. But they were also very important functionally. They housed the temples of gods as well as functioned as a city center that united the people in the area.
Along with having an interest in these cultures, I am especially interested in their astrological knowledge which allowed them to create such accurate calendars. I find it absolutely astounding that the calendars that they developed are still more accurate than the ones that we use today, even though we have much more advanced tools than those of the Maya or other pre-Columbian cultures. I never really took the whole Mayan apocalypse theory too seriously, but I still think it is interesting how well they were able to predict eclipses and other astrological events much farther into the future. Overall I think it would be a great art piece to recreate and explain, as I already have some background knowledge and a lot of interest in the subject.
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