By Erik Vance
It's a bright summer day at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Outside, in the sprawling front plaza rimmed by palm and willow trees, young couples cuddle by the steps, vendors sell wrestling masks and tacos, and five men dressed in traditional Totonac garb slowly spin upside down in the death defying "Dance of the Flyers" for the tourists.
Inside the museum is a wonder of culture and history. Each wing is dedicated to a separate civilization in Mesoamerican culture—one for the Toltecs, another for Teotihuacan. But the largest spaces are reserved for the Aztecs and Maya. And in the center of the building is the stunning Aztec Stone of the Sun—often erroneously called the "Aztec Calendar"—perhaps the most recognizable symbol in Latin America. Diana Magaloni Kerpel, the museum director, peers at the stone.
"It is not a calendar. It's really the image of space and time. It's an image of how the Aztecs conceived themselves as in the center of time and space," she says. "Look at that. There is face in the middle—that is the cosmos. The Maya wouldn't do that—ever."
If you have not been paying attention to doomsayers or John Cusack movies, December 21, 2012, is the day that many say the Maya predicted the world would end. Internet stories regularly detail the Maya calendars although displaying the Aztec Stone of the Sun (including one, we regret, that was published on Scientific American Online). Looking at the reality of ancient Mesoamerica, it quickly becomes clear that much of the uproar rose out of a confusion of two distinct cultures that lived 500 years apart.
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