Maya mathematics, Andean engineering and the lake-cities of Mexico developed with no contact with the Old World. These articles cover the civilisations of the Americas on their own terms, from the first cities to the encounters of the sixteenth century.
The Classic Maya (and their Mesoamerican neighbors) wrote zero as a shell glyph in a place-value system by at least 36 BC — over five centuries before India's conventional date, and independently.
· 36 BCWithout a telescope, the Classic Maya tracked Venus for generations and calculated its cycle at 583.92 days — within 0.01 days of the modern value — recorded in the Venus Table of the Dresden Codex, by naked-eye observation and base-20 math.
· AD 900