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    Yucatan Before and After the Conquest
    Yucatan Before and After the Conquest
    Yucatan Before and After the Conquest
    Ebook358 pages5 hours

    Yucatan Before and After the Conquest

    By Diego de Landa

    3.5/5

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    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMay 23, 2012
    ISBN9780486139197
    Yucatan Before and After the Conquest

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    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      I'm sure translating a text from the 16th century is not an easy task, however, the clunky translation was a bit confusing and sometimes even comical. I guess you take what you can get since Landa destroyed most of Mayan texts and tablets.
    • 5/5
      Actually a 1937 English translation, with rather leftist comments about the Spanish Civil War (pro-Republican) and the Cardenas administration in Mexico (pro). Very interesting source, including not only Landa's very famous explanation of the Maya writing system (which eventually was the starting point for Knosorov's decipherment) and--what i did not know till I read it --a very detailed account of the Mayan "sacred year" with what festivals were celebrated each month, as well as general observations --often favorable --on Mayan life in general. As the translator comments, there is only one paragraph on Landa's notorious (and arguably illegal) autos de fe which brutally persecuted many Maya for alleged relapses into paganism and also destroyed many potentially valuable Maya texts. However, this edition supplements Landa's account with other documents (some from the Maya themselves) giving more context on Landa's activities. Very interesting read in tandem with Clendinnen's Ambivalent Conquest which provides a modern interpretation of the same events (and more Maya documents). I give this 5 stars as an important source, though probably it would rate 4 or less subtracting for Landa's bias.
    • 3/5
      This book is a curious artifact. William Gates has translated it from the original Spanish, and added to de Landa's work, a collection of documents. De Landa, once Friar General of the Franciscan missionary effort in the Yucatan, was tried in Spain after his original stint in the area. His book does contain some special pleading, but is the pioneering work in the field of Mayan ethnography. The additional documents, as well as relating the particulars of the charges against him, also inform the reader about the first thirty years of Spanish activity in the area, and the vicious side of the Spanish Imperial policy in the New world. It is a good book with which to begin one's acquaintance with the Empire, and the area.
    • 4/5
      Interesting first-hand study of Maya culture written by Diego de Landa, a Franciscan monk, in 1566. Four years earlier, he collected all the written records of that culture and burned them as "heretical writings."

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    Yucatan Before and After the Conquest - Diego de Landa

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