For the Aztec culture, accounting for leapyear in the Azteccalendar wasn't as simple as adding on an extra day in February every four years.
Though an ecologist by trade, Ezcurra has always been interested in the environmental history of the Basin of Mexico, which holds Mexico City as well as the ruins of past Indigenous cities like Tenochtitlan and Teotihuacan. The whole area is subject to seasonal monsoons that dictate the agricultural year.
While the Aztecs knew that the solar year contained about 365 days, just as we do, they would have needed a way to recalibrate this calendar — since the Earth actually takes 365 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes to circle the Sun.
Until this most recent study, scholars had yet to find any specific calibration device used by the Aztecs. But Ezcurra suspected they used the horizon itself as a calendric tool, specifically using the day that the sun first hit particular points in the distance while standing at a fixed point to track time.He and his colleagues began to pore through the Aztec codices — books written by the Aztecs about themselves — and early Spanish colonial writings for clues.
“We found with amazement,” Ezcurra says, “that their rituals and celebrations coincided with what you see in the distant horizon from the temple.”Yet this incredible finding still didn’t reveal anything clear about the Aztec New Year. When standing near the Templo Mayor and looking toward the east on Feb. 23, the sun doesn’t rise near anything important.
But when we think about the history of the Basin of Mexico, the Aztecs were hardly the first culture around that would have needed a precise calendar to calibrate their planting and harvests. Cultures and cities had thrived there for centuries before the Mexica people
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