Thank you, you can hear me right? Yes. Thank you, Matias, for the kind introduction. It's very funny

that you find, well you found interesting this story about my ancestor Manuel Martínez Gracia.

Nobody knows him by the way, nobody knows me and in my spare time I dedicate myself to recover

his legacy. So don't imagine this is a famous person in Mexico, it is not and this is a fascinating

man because it is a man from the 19th century so he wrote a lot. He's one of these knowledgeable

man, he knew many languages and he dedicated himself in a time where there was no archaeology,

no anthropology to document cultures and archaeology in the state of Oaxaca and so it passed to me like

anecdotes when I was a child and it impressed me so much that I decided to become an archaeologist,

among other decisions of course, but well I find it fascinating that you remind him. So thank you

for coming. I had the plan for this lecture to talk about two articles that got published in 2016

about May's divination but since I came here I realized that perhaps not many people are familiar

with Mesoamerican culture and worldview and religion and rituals so I decided to go a step

backwards and present you more a descriptive lecture. So I will go more into details and I

will go back to my PhD research which started 10 years ago and I decided also to include the

calendar because in order to understand May's divination we have to link it to the calendar.

So this is the origin of May's divination. Once you consult a diviner among the Mijes,

you cannot just consult the Mijes, you have to consult also the calendar so they come together.

So this is the calendar so I will go because I am an archaeologist I tend to go back and forth in

time so it's very dichronical my presentation. Well the calendar when the Spaniards arrived to

Mesoamerica you tell me if you cannot hear because I tend to go to the slide. It was extended in the

16th century all over Mesoamerica and actually for some scholars it is a marker to define Mesoamerica

as a region actually so more or less to the middle of Mexico to the middle of Central America so it

was extended all over Mesoamerica although we can trace it back in the early history of Mesoamerica

to the 10th century before Christ and we identify it whenever we find dots like these ones dots and

bars these are numerals and when they are combined with a sign this is at least a calendrical date

this is a calendrical element and it is formed by combining 13 numbers and 20 signs so when you

combine these together you end up with a cycle of 260 days this means that in order to arrive to the

same sign and the same number you have to go through 260 positions. Now this is the basis for

all other Mesoamerica calendars there was not just one calendar but this is the basic one so you they

already they also had 365 calendar then when you combine the 260 with the 365 calendar you end up

with cycles of 52 years and for example the Maya developed probably you heard in 2012 the so-called

end of times predicted by the Maya no this was created actually by archaeologists and

the epigraphers that when they found this stela and they interpreted as well the the start of

this very long period of time that only the Maya created not other Mesoamerican people but only

the Maya created and that we call it the long count date this long count date is a very big

period of time that started according to archaeologists and not necessarily the Maya in August 13 3,114

before Christ and until 2012 we arrived to that very long period of time and that is called the

long counting the Maya developed these calendars into a major sophistication and that is why Maya

calendar is studied apart but well in the rest we understand it and the thanks to the historical

sources that this calendar the 260 day it was used for historiographical records to name the

persons actually for example people in Mesoamerica were named with that date so there is a famous

hero in the Mixtec area called the eight deer so eight deer that is the calendrical name

Jauarclo and besides they had a personal name and of course it programmed festivities ceremonies

the market days and of course it was directed directed to the divination and among the Aztecs

so the people here in the center of Mexico they it was used by day keepers a specialized

type of priest the tonal poeque who were those who counted the days and the tonal poeque we

think well these codices have been studied for more than 100 years so now is more or less

understood that that each tonal poeque painted their own books I will pass this around

there are many Mesoamerican codices but I'm just referring to special genre and those are now we

call it Borgia group codices and there are only five of them left in the world all of them in