A recent study reveals that people of the Aztec civilization may have utilized surrounding geologic features like mountains and ridges to note important days for farming. Researchers pointed out that ancient Mesoamerican civilizations used their rugged landscape to mark critical points in the seasons optimal for planting or harvesting.
The researchers also claimed that the natural agricultural calendar assisted civilizations in producing enough crops to feed millions of people.
The study is led by Exequiel Ezcurra, a plant ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, as first reported by ScienceAlert. According to the researchers, the data verifies predictions that the jagged horizon peaks of Mount Tlaloc were used to monitor the agricultural calendar to match the seasons as each solar year passed.
Advanced Agriculture
It has been long discovered that the agriculture of the Valley of Mexico was characterized for many centuries by irrigation systems and chinampas, incorrectly termed "floating gardens," which were a raised-field kind of cultivation. Between rows of ditches or canals, rich soil from a lake's bottom was piled up to construct ridges.
The Mexico Valley is especially dry in the spring. Meanwhile, monsoon season arrives in the summer and early autumn. This necessitates the development of a season-marking system to allow for planting during rainy seasons and harvesting during dry seasons.
Because of the annual cycle of dry and wet weather, crops must be sown at particular periods. Otherwise, the entire harvest could be jeopardized.
According to the California research team, planting too soon, on the cue of a first random early rain, can be disastrous if the actual rainy season does not persist.
Meanwhile, Ezcurra and his colleagues argue that planting late, after the monsoon season has definitely begun, exposes the corn field, or milpa, to an abnormally short growing season and exposes the crop to competition from weeds that have already grown.
How It Works
The Mexican landscape served as an excellent calendar. Due to the tilting of the Earth, the point in the horizon from which the Sun rises moves from day to day throughout the year,
The Sun rises directly east only at the equinoxes. When the North Pole is tilted toward the Sun in the Northern Hemisphere summer, the Sun will rise north of due east in the celestial horizon, attaining a compass bearing of about. The summer solstice temperature is 65 °F.
According to the study, successful farming in central and western Mesoamerica depended on keeping an accurate calendar to predict the seasons.
In fact, in the 16th century, Dominican explorer Diego Durán reported as "a very remarkable fact" that the Mexica farmers strictly followed the calendrically based instruction of the elders to cultivate and harvest their fields and refused to start their agricultural production without their approval.
It is an exact method of timekeeping since, according to Ezcurra and his team's calculations, there is only one day in spring and one day in fall when the Sun rises directly behind a famous mountain in the area.
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