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The Meridian Mysteries and the Secret of Time

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The Chaco and Mayan Meridians

In 1990 while studying rock art in the American southwest, James Jacobs noticed that Aztec Ruins and Chaco Culture were on the same meridian or north-south longitude line, and he raised the point with the archaeological community. Then in 1991, he expanded his view to include sites in Mexico, adding Paquimé to the ‘Chaco Meridian’, and he identified a ‘Mayan Meridian’ running through sites in the Yucatán to Tikal in Guatemala. Jacobs believes that this is evidence that ancient Americans practiced geodesy or took accurate measurements of Earth’s size, and he provides analysis of arc distance ratios to support his theory.

In 1999, Stephen Lekson wrote a book called The Chaco Meridian, bringing wider attention to Jacobs’ discovery. But Lekson argues that this is only evidence that the ancient people moved in straight lines north and south. He believes the Ancestral Puebloans used a series of north-south visual bearings to align the sites on the Chaco Meridian, and he points to the great north-south roads of Chaco.

Some critics dismiss both theories and argue that there are so many ancient sites scattered all over North America that any straight line will pass through 3 or more, so any meridian is merely coincidence. So, who’s right? First, the odds that a straight line will run north-south are 1 in 180, so a meridian is not just a random line.

Second, UNESCO recognizes 20 Pre-Columbian settlements as World Heritage Sites in North America, including 1 pre-Mayan, 8 Mayan, 3 Ancestral Puebloan, 5 other contemporaries of the Maya, and 3 post Mayan. All three of the UN-recognized Ancestral Puebloan sites are at 108º longitude: Chaco, Mesa Verde and Paquimé. 6 of the Mayan sites are at 89º longitude: Calakmul, Chichén Itzá, Copan, Quirigua, Tikal and Uxmal. The other 2 Mayan sites are Palenque at 92º and Tak’alik Ab’aj at 91.5º. But Palenque and Tikal are both at 17º latitude. So 100% of the UN-recognized Ancestral Puebloan and Mayan sites are on the same longitude or latitude lines. Statistically, the odds that all 11 independently selected sites share the same three longitudes by accident is 1 in a trillion. Unintentionally, UNESCO confirms both meridians.

The Difficulty of Calculating a Meridian

So, how did the ancient native people build cities on the same latitude and longitude lines before GPS and even before 250 BCE when the Greek Eratosthenes first recorded the idea of plotting longitude and latitude on a grid?

Calculating latitude is easy in the northern hemisphere. Simply measure the angle between the North Star and the horizon. If it’s 90º then you are at the North Pole, and your latitude is 90º. If it’s 0º, then you’re at the equator, latitude 0º.

Calculating longitude accurately is much more difficult, since although the stars stay in place, we orbit the sun every year and rotate every 24 hours. Every 4 minutes, the Earth turns one degree of longitude. So to calculate your longitude, you need to measure a star’s angle on a specific date and time, which requires both a calendar and an accurate measurement of time. For example, we know that the sun is directly overhead at noon, and if we knew which star was directly overhead at midnight on a given date, then we would know our longitude.

There’s a common misperception that calculating longitude requires knowledge of the size of the globe or the location of Greenwich England. While Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference, longitude measures angle, independently of size, which is why it works the same at every latitude. Greenwich was chosen by committee as our 0º Prime Meridian in 1884 over 100 years after longitude entered common use in navigation with marine clocks. So a useful relative longitude just needs a clock, not membership in any Royal Astronomical Society.

Lekson’s theory of north-south visual bearings might possibly explain the now desert Chaco Meridian sites, but I’ve driven the route which includes some rough elevation changes that would have made it extremely difficult to take accurate bearings over hundreds of miles, even with signal fires. And Lekson’s theory fails completely on the Mayan Meridian, due to the jungle. The hilly Yucatán terrain is covered by fast growing tall trees in a thick jungle that’s difficult to pass. While they built temples that reached above the treetops, that doesn’t explain how they chose the sites in the jungle before building the tall temples. There’s certainly no view of the horizon from the middle of the jungle, even if you clear all the trees for a few miles. So any line of sight explanation is wrong.

Alien Technology or Magic?!?

But the experts say that neither the Ancestral Puebloans nor the Mayans kept time accurately. So, the lack of a satisfactory explanation for how ancient people could apparently calculate longitude has caused a few people to speculate wildly. They imagine that the Knights Templar visited the Mayans while searching for New Atlantis, that maybe aliens gave technology to the Mayans, or that some other magic knowledge of invisible Earth energy—ley lines—is the explanation. No.

Cultural Clues to Calculations

While his original book was criticized for a few errors, Lekson is correct that there is a cultural connection between the ancient sites that made the meridians important to the people who built temples there. The sites share some historic overlapping, they were on established trade routes, and there are some basic architectural similarities, such as buildings oriented north-south. Agricultural societies are acutely aware of seasons, and each season has a different view of the stars at night as the earth orbits the sun. There are observatories at many sites, including at Chichén Itzá below, at Palenque and Xochicalo—with view holes in the observatory roof similar to a planetarium—, so there’s lots of evidence that accurate angles could be calculated on specific days and even at specific times of night. So Lekson’s basic theory, that there was an educated priestly elite with detailed knowledge of astronomy that likely traveled between sites, fits the known facts well.

Importantly, the three main sites on the Chaco Meridian all have advanced irrigation systems. The Greeks used water flowing through fixed diameter holes to measure time, like an hourglass measures time with the flow of sand. Surely, some Ancestral Puebloans tried to measure accurately how long their water supply would last. Yet for some reason, the idea that the ancient North American natives could calculate time is dismissed.

The Mayans were obsessed with the passage of time. The Mayan calendar has 365 days, uses a base 20 number system, and describes cycles of both 52 years and 5,125 years. You may have heard that the Mayans predicted the end of the world on December 21st, 2012. What they actually said was that their long count would reset on that day to begin a new five millennia era. Counting the days and monitoring the sun were central to their daily lives. The pyramid at Chichén Itzá has 365 steps, and the shadow of a serpent appears to climb them on the solstices. They believed the Sun God brought order to the day and transformed into a jaguar to pass through the perilous night.

And similar beliefs were common across pre-Columbian civilizations. From the Caves of Mitla & Yagul to El Tajin’s 365 daily shadowed alcoves, the ancients contemplated the underworld and the sun’s ordered journey across the sky. The tallest temple in Mexico is the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacán, where a ‘town crier’ would beat his drum to signify important events. And yet some experts today would stand at the feet of the pyramids, perfectly aligned with the sun at noon, while shadows cast points across the plazas and claim that not one of the ancient people knew the time of day.

I do not understand how anyone can argue that the Mayans recorded their dynasties for centuries without having any interest or ideas on how one might calculate shorter time periods. These ancient agricultural societies had tens of thousands laboring in the fields, military groups coordinating jungle raids, traders delivering on precise daily schedules over hundreds of miles—in Tenochtitlan Montezuma ate fresh fish carried by relay runners from the Pacific—, and had thousands of laborers building precise pyramids, and yet some otherwise smart folks maintain the absurd position that none of the natives had any idea how long a day was nor could anyone organize anything that today requires a clock.

The simplest and only remaining logical explanation of the meridians is that some elite of both the Ancestral Puebloans and Mayans had a rudimentary way to calculate time accurately, most likely some type of shadow tracking and water flow systems, as they used both. They may have guarded that secret and kept it from the masses, but someone must have figured out how to tell time or there would be no meridian mysteries. Once we recognize that ancient American astronomers had the ability to measure time accurately, then we know that they could measure the angle of the a star on a particular day and time and calculate their relative longitude at different places. The time would only need to be accurate to within a few minutes at each location in order to mark a new temple within a degree of any known meridian, even in the jungle without a view of the horizon.

But Why Did They Build on Meridians?

But why bother? This is another problem with Lekson’s theory. Even if you accept that ancient people were very attuned to direction and solstices, such annual calendaring doesn’t require longitude at all, while latitude is only incidentally useful. So what’s the practical benefit of building two buildings on the same meridian? For that matter, why bother calculating the size of the earth, if Jacobs is correct about ancient American geodesy? Who cares that the arc distance between two distant buildings is 1% of the circumference of the globe, especially if your number system isn’t even based on 10 or 100?

To understand why, consider your last visit to a planetarium show. They likely showed which constellations appeared in the skies on that date and showed how the stars moved over time. If an ancient priest knew in advance which stars would rise into the sky at what time, then they could plan to tell a story about the stars that fit each day of the year. We know from many sites that the ancient Americans had a deep belief system involving day and night, believing that the labor of those on earth and the struggles of those in the underworld were connected to the rise of the sun each day. The stories of the stars may have revolved around heroes or rulers who had passed on to the afterlife, like the Greek myths that appear in the constellations.

If you had two temples on the same meridian, you could tell the exact same story on the same day beginning at the same time, and the sky would follow your words precisely. Even in daylight, using the same measuring sticks, the shadows would appear exactly at the moment you predict. This, perhaps, was the purpose of building your most important temples on the same meridian: to demonstrate the power of math and knowledge before the ignorant masses.

Although much of the history, language and culture of the ancient Americans was lost, the Yucatán pyramids and great kivas of the southwest have survived, demonstrating that there were at least a few ancient people who maintained the same astrological, calendaric, cartographic, chronologic, geometric, mathematical and navigational knowledge across generations and across cultural boundaries. They intentionally convinced others to build multiple cities on the same meridians to keep their predictions and myth-making consistent for at least a thousand years. The alignment of North American Native American World Heritage Sites proves this indisputably, without a plausible, logical alternative explanation. And if we refuse to recognize their accomplishments that still stand today, then we are the ignorant and irrational ones.

Moravian Church Settlements—Bethlehem

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This is a model of the Gemeinhaus or community house of the Moravians in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, built between 1741 and 1743. The model is inside the original building, the largest 18th century log structure in continuous use in the US. There are several Moravian buildings from the same period in the historic district in Bethlehem, including housing for men and women, a pump house—the first municipal water system in the US—, a chapel, and a tavern, and all are now recognized as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that includes similar Moravian sites in the Denmark, Germany and the UK. Their school buildings are now part of Moravian University here.

The Moravians, a Protestant sect that predated Martin Luther, originally came from Moravia, now the Czech Republic, but their prime benefactor was a Saxon (German), Count von Zinzendorf, so their Bible is in old, low German. They created settlements around the world in order to do Missionary work, and in Pennsylvania, they were famous for their hospitality, music and for their early efforts to learn Native American languages and hold peaceful conferences with both native and colonial leaders.

The Gemeinhaus was multifunctional, especially before other buildings were finished, and one use was as an inn. The knowledgeable docent led me into the large simple chapel on the second floor, a music room with various instruments that predate the famed Bach Choir of Bethlehem, and explained various exhibits with original items, including fine silk needlework, kitchen items and more. While many of the later buildings are still in use by the University and as housing, the core building’s remarkable preservation makes this is an exceptional way to step back over 250 years into colonial, and early American history. But also walk around the fascinating historic town, which includes an 18th century Native American house.

But my favorite building is the Sun Inn tavern from 1758, where George & Martha Washington stayed, Sam Adams drank ale, and an impressively long list of revolutionaries met over many years. It seems likely to me that Ben Franklin would have met members of the Iroquois Confederacy here, along with Moravian translators, inspiring him to incorporate their ideas into his design of our US democracy which balanced the needs of both the states and the country. There’s no better way to experience history than to raise a glass to our founders in one of their favorite drinking establishments!

Everglades National Park

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The southern end of Florida is home to Everglades National Park, which is also a UNESCO Biosphere and a World Heritage Site. Since 1900, the area has been both protected and threatened, with political battles needed to protect bird plumage, to create the park, and to protect the large, diverse ecosystem here. Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote a book to explain how the Shark Valley River Slough runs as a “river of grass” through the Everglades. When summer rains fill Lake Okeechobee, a sheet of water overflows the low bank and floods the flat grasslands, revitalizing fish eggs and a whole ecosystem. A cross Florida road called the Tamiami Trail prevented that flow, and a political battle was fought to restore it partially. The fresh water eventually sinks through the limestone, filling the Biscayne Aquifer to provide drinking water for Miami. There are also canals crisscrossing lower Florida, including here, and that’s where these two young alligators were hanging out. Alligator Alcatraz, a temporary migrant detention center, is in the Everglades ecosystem, but it’s not in the national park. Alligator Alcatraz is north of the Tamiami trail in Big Cypress National Preserve.

The park is 1.5 million acres, including the mangrove islands that form the southern end of Florida, before the Keys. The best place to see the mangroves is by boat, either from Everglades City west of Big Cypress or by driving to Flamingo. I took my family to the latter, and we saw a large crocodile near the dock, plus much more wildlife on a quick cruise in the “submerged wilderness” of Florida Bay. Personally, I wouldn’t kayak these waters, but many people do, camping on the Chickees or raised bits of ground where natives camped seasonally and for different purposes for centuries at least. There’s even a paddling waterway to go between Everglades City and Flamingo. Before the highway was built out to Key West, visitors commonly took a similar route by boat.

The work of environmental protection is never done. Burmese pythons entered the park in the 1970s—likely as discarded pets—, and now they’ve wiped out most of the native animals, threatening the Florida panther with extinction. I was disappointed to see the dramatic decline in wildlife evident from the Shark Valley Tower, since I first visited decades ago and even since I visited again with my family not so many years ago. And since last year, the state government is not allowed to mention climate change, global warming or sea level rise, but that obviously won’t do anything to prevent rising sea levels from submerging much of southern Florida, including most of Miami and almost 1/2 the park in the coming decades. Especially if the government refuses to take action, climate science clearly shows that the environment will only continue to worsen more rapidly.

Here are my visits to all parks in Florida.

Redwood National and State Parks

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After Yosemite’s magnificent waterfalls, stunning vistas and valleys, Redwood is quieter, with more solitude and an intimate closeness with the trees: less spectacle and more spiritual. This World Heritage Site is a marvelous place to get lost alone among giants, to reminisce as if traversing the great forests of Middle Earth. One of the young hikers strode in full Frodo costume, looking for Ents. As some of the trees living here predate all but the earliest human history, you can’t blame him for getting into the spirit. When Frodo first entered Lothlórien to seek Galadriel’s help, he spent his first night in a treehouse in a giant Mallorn tree. “He felt a delight in the wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.”

My favorite park for tall trees, the redwood forest is real and huge, so plan on hiking. The photo above is near Trillium Falls on a highly recommended 3 miles hike in the National Park from Elk Meadow near the south end of the park. I also walked from the Prairie Creek visitor center up to Big Tree—a Giant Coastal Redwood—in the Prairie Creek State Park on the Knapp trail returning on the Cathedral trail on the other side of the scenic drive. There are several ways to do the 3 mile loop, as well as plenty of shorter or longer hikes from many trailheads, flat or up onto ridges or down to the coast. There are also tide pools, fresh water lagoons, beaches, mountains, camping, elk (I saw 12) and more. Best of all, it was 30 degrees cooler than inland in July. The coastal redwood forest is lush and beautiful, safe for now.

“Many of these trees were my friends.
Creatures I had known from nut or acorn.
They had voices of their own.”

—Treebeard

Here are my visits to all parks in California.

Yosemite National Park

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In 1859 John Muir built a Sugar Pine cabin some yards from the spot above and lived in the Valley for 2 years. Sugar Pines can live 500 years, so the decades John Muir spent saving this valley are just a fraction of their long lives. Muir saved Yosemite, lost neighboring Hetch Hetchy to a dam, and influenced Teddy Roosevelt who ended up protecting 150 million acres of forests nationally. Now the park is a World Heritage Site, with the Merced River running through Yosemite Valley and the headwaters of the Tuolumne River running through the meadows designated wild & scenic; it’s my favorite park for waterfalls. But in the near future, the crown jewel of John Muir’s legacy may still be lost forever.

Some species of trees still living here evolved in the Jurassic, long before the Chicxulub asteroid wiped out most dinosaurs and millions of years before humans arrived. Millenia ago, natives started fires for hunting and agriculture, and over a century ago, the timber industry clear cut forests throughout the Sierra Nevadas. But humans now present a threat bigger than any logging or dam. Now the threat is carbon pollution, which dwarfs all others, even logging. Fires burn hotter, more frequently and many times larger, because we have changed our planet’s climate dramatically—and it’s still getting worse. Species here, despite evolving 1000 times earlier than humans, are now threatened with extinction by our vehicle exhaust.

10 years ago, the 250,000+ acre Rim Fire burned over 10% of Yosemite, killing many Sugar Pines and Sequoias that had survived fires for centuries or millennia. At the time, it was the second largest fire in California history. Now it doesn’t even make the top ten. I visited the park with my family before that fire, and the park was undamaged. Now, the park is still beautiful, but it is still scarred badly, with many areas still closed.

Yosemite Falls should not be so glorious in the photo above taken in July. The snow should still be on the mountain tops, melting slowly over many months. Instead, every decade is warmer than the last and the rate of temperature rise in increasing. The Lyell Glacier that Muir saw in Yosemite has lost over 95% of its mass, no longer moves and will be gone in a few years. Man has messed up the climate, and many of the species, including the largest trees, can no longer live here safely. And it’s not the fault of Smoky Bear telling people to put out their campfires, it’s the fault of people who continue to drive gas powered vehicles. And yet the park is full of them, blithely surveying the damage they contributed to and continue to cause. If I were in charge of the park service, I would convert the shuttle buses to electric and ban all fossil fuel vehicles.

Here are my visits to all parks in California.

Olympic National Park

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Even though the Hoh Rain Forest is on the far side of the park from Seattle, it’s popular in July, so I watched an otter playing in the water for half an hour while waiting my turn to drive through the gate to look for parking. (A parking map at the gate would save everyone time). The Hall of Mosses Trail above is easily hiked from the visitor center, and it’s impressive and definitely worth the trip. Several of the trees appear to be 1000 years old, and the streams are clear from spring water, where I saw tiny salmon among the bright green watercress.

There are some signs that the increased heat from carbon pollution is damaging some of the mosses, and while the overall annual precipitation has remained the same, it’s more concentrated in heavy downpours and less in the misty fog-drip that these sensitive plants require. The glaciers are also disappearing rapidly and will disappear completely in a few decades or less, severely impacting all the downstream ecosystems. Still, it’s my favorite park for moss.

Of course, Olympic also has mountains, including Hurricane Ridge and Mount Olympus, which feeds the Hoh and Queets Rivers. There’s a Hot Springs resort at Sol Duc and boating at Lake Crescent. The Olympic Peninsula also has Native American Reservations which help manage the coastal wilderness, wildlife refuge and marine sanctuary. For me, their crown jewel is their large temperate rainforest, but the other areas are also stunning. Some artists are painting the glaciers before they melt, but wouldn’t it be better if we all did our part to reduce our carbon footprints?

Here are my visits to all parks in Washington.

Glacier National Park

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The horizontal line across the Garden Wall on the other side of the valley is the Going-to-the Sun Road, which I finally drove—3rd time’s the charm. This year the dramatically scenic road opened on 13 June with little ice & snow visible in July. Just over the wall in Many Glacier, old photos show the many large glaciers are now very small, rapidly melting glaciers. My son and I rode horseback up in 2018, and the area should be renamed Many Lakes. The wild & scenic Flathead River forms some of the park’s boundaries, and it’s now filled with snowpack runoff more than glacier melt. Combined with its neighbor across the border, Waterton Glacier International Peace Park is still a UNESCO World Heritage Site, despite the obvious melting problem.

Melting ice and glaciers are one of the tipping points that will flip our Climate Crisis into a catastrophe. Consider the Arctic ice cap. Every year recently, the multi-year ice has been shrinking at an accelerating rate. Eventually, the ice will disappear in summer. Then the same energy that currently raises ocean surface temperatures by 1° will raise it by a multiple of that amount. There are two reasons for that. First, the white ice will no longer reflect the sun. Second, the existing ice will no longer be there to act as a temperature break. When you boil water with ice, it takes something like three times the energy as water without ice, because most of the energy goes into melting the ice first. So, not only is it bad that glacial ice is melting due to flooding and dry rivers in the fall, but once the ice is gone, the surface temperature rise will accelerate much more rapidly. Please, reduce your carbon footprint.

Here are my visits to all parks in Montana.

Yellowstone National Park

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Clockwise from top: Morning Glory pool, Daisy, Grand and Old Faithful geysers.

Most of the world’s geysers are here, near the country’s largest high elevation lake and the headwaters of the longest free-flowing river in the lower 48, in a park bigger than some states. For wildlife alone, this is my favorite national park, plus the geysers are my favorite geologic feature in a park. There’s a lot to see and do, but I’m not going to write more about it. Come see for yourself.

Here are my visits to all parks in Wyoming.

All Frank Lloyd Wright World Heritage Sites by EV

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UNESCO chose eight Frank Lloyd Wright sites for World Heritage status, and I visited them all this year by EV. An exhaustive tour of Wright’s designs could visit 100 sites, but the Heritage 8 are sufficient for me. My cross country trip went from Hollywood, to Arizona, Wisconsin, Chicago, Pennsylvania and finally to New York, but it’s easier to understand his life’s work below chronologically.

His home and studio in Oak Park Illinois showcases his various styles, influences and experiments, including his first design: his own home. While this is the one site I visited that is not on the World Heritage list, just walking the neighborhood is worth the trip.

Unity Temple in Oak Park in 1905 is a church built for his mother.

Robie House at University of Chicago in 1910 is my favorite, built for a wealthy client who only lived in it briefly.

Taliesin in Spring Green Wisconsin in 1911, later rebuilt after a dramatic tragedy, used funds from Robie to build a family country home with a school for his acolytes.

Hollyhock House in Hollywood California in 1921, was built for a theatrical oil heiress who fired him for going over budget.

Fallingwater (above) in Mill Run Pennsylvania in 1937, is his most iconic private residence, built for a wealthy department store owner whose son gave it to the park service.

Taliesin West in Scottsdale Arizona in 1937, used funds from Fallingwater to build a winter home with another school for his acolytes.

Jacobs House in Madison Wisconsin in 1937, was built to demonstrate that Wright could design something affordable on a budget.

The Guggenheim in New York City in 1959, was built to display art and to be art, for the future.

I hope you enjoyed this brief tour of 50+ years of the most widely recognized designs from America’s greatest architect.