The Aztec and Maya Payer Makers

Covering the Aztec Diamond

There are 107 non-isomorphic coverings of the Aztec diamond of order 5 by the 25 one-sided tetrasticks. In [6] Donald Knuth describes how to attack certain types of puzzles by computer. One type of puzzle he tried to solve is the covering of patterns by tetrasticks. Tetrasticks — or more general polysticks — were introduced by Brian Barwell [1]: Pieces made from a fixed number of line segments ...

The Maya Forest: destroyed or cultivated by the ancient Maya?

B oth academic and popular perceptions concerning the relationship between the Maya (ancient and modern) and the Maya Forest in which their culture developed and persisted formore than three millennia are varied and continuously subject to change (1). The analysis of a sediment core from a pond located near the ancient Maya city of Copan, Honduras, interpreted byMcNeil et al. (2) in this issue ...

Aztec medicine.

THE discovery of America placed the European nations in contact with three major civilizations, the Aztec in the Mexican plateau, the Maya in the Yucatan peninsula, and the Inca in the Peruvian Andes. The Mayas had been settled for centuries in the same area and developed a civilization with high cultural manifestations, whereas the Aztecs and Incas, in spite of their political power and strong...

Aztec Art

Aztec Diamonds and Baxter Permutations

Abstract We present a proof of a conjecture about the relationship between Baxter permutations and pairs of alternating sign matrices that are produced from domino tilings of Aztec diamonds. It is shown that a tiling corresponds to a pair of ASMs that are both permutation matrices if and only if the larger permutation matrix corresponds to a Baxter permutation. There has been a thriving literat...