The fullest early account of the Maya of Yucatán, written by the Franciscan friar who had burned their books. It describes their towns, houses, calendar, writing, rites and the ruins of Chichén Itzá and Mayapán.
Diego de Landa arrived in Yucatán as a young missionary in 1549 and rose to be provincial of his order. In 1562 he ran an inquisition at Maní that ended in torture and in the burning of Maya books and images; recalled to Spain to answer for it, he wrote this account in his defence, drawing on Maya informants such as the nobleman Gaspar Antonio Chi. He returned as bishop of Yucatán and died there in 1579.
The original is lost. What survives is an abridged copy of about 1660, found in Madrid by the abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg and published in 1864; it is usually divided into some fifty numbered sections. Besides the famous (and misunderstood) “alphabet” that later helped decipher Maya writing, it tells how towns were laid out round their temples and plazas, how houses were built and roofed, how the lords were served, and how Mayapán had been walled.
Landa saw the towns of the sixteenth century, not the Classic cities abandoned six hundred years before; but excavation has found the pattern he describes (temples and plazas at the centre, the great families round them, the poor at the edges) at Classic sites as well.
The book, part by part
I §§ VI–VIII: Chichén Itzá and Mayapán
The history of the league of Mayapán; its walled city, with the temples in the middle and the lords’ houses round them.
II § XX: Houses and towns
The thatched house divided by a wall along its length, the whitewashed front room; the town with its temples and plazas at the centre, the houses of the lords and priests around, and the common people at the edge.
Rules: Temples in the middle, the poor at the edge · The Maya house: a steep thatch over a divided room