The Mayan calendar cycles through two distinct year counts , plus five "nameless" days of bad luck called Uayeb , that together depict a 52 year Calendar Round .
The Sacred Year , or "tzolkin" , consists of 260 days the Mayans count as 13 months with 20 day-names.That year intermeshes with a "vague" or a solar called "haab" which demarked 365 days with 18 month-names of 20 days , numbered from 0 to 19 , plus those five "bad" days.
They also counted time through a series of cycles of days , called "kins" :the uinal(20 kins) , tun
(360kins), katun (7200 kins) , baktun (144,000 kins) , and the alautun of 23,040,000,000 kins which counts sixty three miion , eighty thousand and eighty two years of 365,25 days each.
The first two years-counts allowed all of the Meso-American civilization to determine , with great accuracy , dates within each period of fifty two years , because the least common multiple of 260 and 365 works out to 18,980 days , or 52 years , perhaps also useful as an average lifespan , or two generations.
260 x 73 = 18,980 (52 years)
365 x 52 = 18,980 (52 years)
18,980 divided by 20 = 949 months of twenty days ( 52 years)
In Mayan cultures of the Guatemalan highlands outside of Guatemala City , they still use the 260 day calendar , secret sacred caves , and ancient prayers and processions to Mayan deities incorporated into the iconography of thin veneer of Spanish Catholicism
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