Mayan Long Count

It seemed appropriate that Timewave 2012 should include a Mayan calendar conversion tool, so I decided to build one. In researching for this project I found that the presentation of the calendar in modern interpretations only considers five cycles within the long count: kin (1 day), winal (18 days), tun (360 days), katun (7200 days), and baktun (144,000 days). Digging a bit deeper this is not the full extent of the calendar. Some monuments have much larger dates including one at Coba which has a long count containing 19 places. This would move the scope of the calendar well beyond the billions of years scientists claim to be the age of the universe. In this model of the calendar, creation occured on:13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0.0
Such a difference in scope exists between these two models of the calendar it seems likely that the interpretation that the calendar ends in 2012 may be a bit off the mark. how could it be that the baktun cycle begins at 0 yet ends at 13? Here we see both notations being used in the higher cycles (those greater than a human lifetime) an indication that the baktun cycle must be 20 in length not 13, for if it were 13 in length the mark for 13 would not have been used but rather 0.
Interestingly the Maya traditionally consider the cycle just above baktun, the piktun, to encompass a lifecycle of the universe. So at the beginning of a piktun the universe is both destroyed and created. The current piktun began in 3113 and is set to complete in 4772, well beyond the 2012 date. If you go back another piktun you are looking at 10998 BCE which just happens to be the time when the ice age ended and great floods abounded.
The woman responsible for transcribing the 19 place long count, Linda Schele, had this to say about the piktun / creation cycle:
If you add 13 bak’tuns to the same 4 Ahaw 8 Kumk’u, you get 4 Ahaw 3 K’ank’in. This is the famous 2012 date that everyone treats as the end of the world. Well, Pakal wrote something in the west panel of the Temple of Inscriptions that does not agree with this interpretation. I think you’ve probably worked both of the passages out yourself. In one passage he said explicitly that the 1st piktun will end on 10 Ahaw 13 Yaxk’in. Check it out. If you add 8,000 tuns to 4 Ahaw 8 K’ank’in you get 10 Ahaw 13 Yaxk’in. And notice that he recorded the ends of the nine k’atuns of his history, then the end of the current k’atun 13, then the current bak’tun of 10, then the current piktun of 1. He was creating a symmetry of every larger cycles.
But he went further. He added a long distance number to connect his birth date (9.8.9.13.0 8 Ahaw 13 Pop) to t the 80th calendar round anniversary of his accession. Furthermore, he said that this date will be celebrated 8 days after the end of the 1st piktun. If the 2012 date were a new era date, the count would have to start all over again with everything “zeroing”—that is, if it is to work the way the ancient Maya treated their era date. According to Pakal, it will not “zero”.
Feel free to play with the calculator built at http://timewave2012.com/mayan there is also a java version there which I will be enhancing and perhaps tying into the timewave calculator over the next few winals.