These people also used certain characters or letters, with which they wrote in their books about the antiquities and their sciences. We found a great number of books in these letters and since they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods of the devil we burned them all, which they took most grievously, and which gave them great pain. So writes Friar Diego de Landa in his Relación De las cosas de Yucatan of 1566, the basic book in Maya studies. Landa did all he could to wipe out Maya culture and civilization. In the famous auto da fé of July 1562 at Maní, as he tells us, he destroyed 5,000 "idols" and burned 27 hieroglyphic rolls. And yet paradoxically Landa's book, written in Spain to defend himself against charges of despotic mismanagement, is the only significant account of Yucatan done in the early post-Conquest era. As the distinguished Maya scholar William Gates states in his introduction, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told." Yucatan Before and After the Conquest is the first English translation of this very important work. Landa's book gives us a full account of Maya customs, daily activities, history, ceremonial festivals, and the many social and communal functions in which their life was expressed. Included here are the geography and natural history of Yucatan, the history of the Conquest, indigenous architecture and other aspects of Maya civilization (sciences, books, religion, etc.), native historical traditions, the Inquisition instituted by the Spanish clergy, Maya clothing, food, commerce, agriculture, human sacrifices, calendrical lore, and much more.

Yucatan Before and After the Conquest (Native American)

History

Landa, Diego De

Americas

Dover Publications

In an ambitious new translation of Diego de Landa's Account of the Things of Yucatán (Relación de las cosas de Yucatán), the editor revises and updates the language for the contemporary reader of English. In the process he captures the narrative power and intensity, the nuances and subtleties of meaning and the emotions of Landa's history of Yucatán at the time of Spanish arrival, conquest, and settlement of the peninsula. Landa's observations speak of his intellectual curiosity about and of his respect for the First Peoples of Yucatán. For instance, he credits the vast architectural legacy, from the pyramids to the monumental ceremonial centers, to the Mayas' ancestors, and not other "nations." At the same time, Landa surmises that the Maya of centuries past were healthier, better fed, and enjoyed a more diverse diet compared to the Maya of his time. This has only recently been confirmed through the analysis of human remains dating back to the Classic Maya period. These intellectual insights, however, stand in sharp contrast with Landa's conviction that the devil visited Yucatán, which led him to establish an Inquisition, for which he was denounced and made to defend himself before the Council of the Indies in Spain. This episode remains arguably the darkest one in Yucatán's post-Hispanic history. These beliefs about the presence of the devil, however, as the Salem witch trials a century later demonstrate, were common throughout the world at the time. Now, for the first time, both a new English-language translation and Landa's original Spanish-language manuscript are published in the same volume, offering readers the opportunity to read the text in both English and Spanish. This is the timeless historical work that constitutes the foundation of our understanding of the ambivalence that characterizes the co-existence of the Maya and Spaniards in Yucatán, an ambivalence that in many ways continues to the present day.

Yucatan at the Time of the Spanish Encounter: Relacion de Las Cosas de Yucatan (English and Spanish Edition)

Hispanic Economics Inc.

Bericht aus Yucatan.

Rincon, C.

Reclam, Leipzig

Relación de las cosas de Yucatán (Historia) (Spanish Edition)

Landa encontró similitudes entre el cristianismo y la religión maya en lo concerniente a los sacrificios humanos y ofrendas de sangre. Asociando dichas ofrendas con el carácter sacrificial de la figura de Cristo que había dado su vida por la humanidad. En su madurez Landa se dedicó al estudio de la cultura Maya. La presente Relación apareció hacia 1566. Es una obra de referencia para entender el mundo maya.

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