Ralph L. Roys

The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel

During a large part of the colonial period, and even down into the Nineteenth Century, many of the towns and villages of northern Yucatan possessed Books of Chilam Balam, and this designation was supplemented by the name of the town to which the book belonged. Thus the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel is named for a village in the District of Tekax, a short distance northwest of the well-known town of Teabo.

REVIEW OF THE EARLY PRECERAMIC COMPLEXES OF THE SANTA ELENA PENINSULA, ECUADOR

Acknowledgments. This work has been supported by a research grant (410-79-0448) from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The author thanks Peter Mathews for his comments on an earlier version of this paper. The author also thanks the Centro Regional Sureste of the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia in Merida, Yucatan for its permission to study Hecelchakan, Column 1.

The Franciscan Contribution to Maya Linguistic Research in Yucatan

Linguistic Science, like history, ethnology and epigraphy, is deeply indebted to the Franciscan missionaries who worked among the Maya Indians of Yucatan. About 1566 Fray Diego de Landa, later Bishop of Yucatan, not only wrote an ethnological treatise perhaps unique in the history of that science, but, as an outstanding contemporary epigrapher recently wrote: “Landa’s description of the calendar and his illustrations of day and month signs supplied a firm foundation on which to reconstruct Maya hieroglyphic writing; it is as close to a Rosetta Stone as we are ever likely to get.” Further development of our investigation of the Maya glyphs will in all probability be closely linked with our knowledge of the language.