Some Postclassic Questions About the Classic Maya

Abstract

The Postclassic and Colonial texts of the Books of Chilam Balam tell us very little, or so I believe, about the Classic Maya directly. And that little, though very precious, is confined to brief passages in the first three Chronicles, and may have been reshaped to fit the mythological predilections of a later age. The Chronicles being much the best known passages of the Books to Mayanists (Barrera, 1948; Roys 1935), and the events they chronicle being as much as a millennium removed from the composition of the surviving versions, I shall eschew here any attempt to interpret their direct relevance to Mayan Classic history in detail. While the Books do not give us direct answers to our questions about the Classic Maya, they do raise some interesting questions about Classic Maya culture to which archaeology, art history and epigraphy may eventually supply answers. It is the object of this paper to isolate some of these questions, primarily social, calendrical and literary. The basis of these queries is my recent translations of the Books of Tizimin (Edmonson, n. d. a: completed) and Chumayel (Edmonson, n. d. b: in draft). Largely on internal evidence, I conclude that the extant versions of these two Books date to the period between 1824 and 1837. Even if, as I believe, they contain passages transcribed from pre-Conquest glyphic texts, they are nonetheless separated from the end of the Classic period by nearly a thousand years. They present corresponding problems of interpretation before we use them in the reconstruction of earlier Mayan history.

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