Four lengthy scholarly articles on the Yucatecan site of Mayapan make up this volume, which is part of a final reporting on this aspect of the Carnegie Institution’s program of Maya research. Most of the field work for the Mayapan studies was accomplished in the years 1951-1955.
Three of the articles are technical archaeological reports: “Civic and Religious Structures of Mayapan” and “The Artifacts of Mayapan,” both by Tatiana Proskouriakoff; and “Residential and Associated Structures at Mayapan,” by A. Ledyard Smith.
These are full, detailed, and abundantly illustrated reports. The fourth article is a survey and summary of written documentation on Mayapan by Ralph L. Roys.
The Roys article will be of most direct interest to historians, particularly those concerned with problems of native documentation and Spanish-Indian relations. Roys describes and comments on sources that make reference to Mayapan, including Landa, the Relaciones geográficas, the books of Chilam Balam, and a number of lesser known writings. A documented examination of Mayapan history is included, as well as a series of extracts from the sources in English translation.
An Introduction to this work by its editor, H. E. D. Pollack, summarizes the archaeology and history of Mayapan with special attention to the problems of correlation between artifacts and written sources. The correlation remains of course imperfect. But Mayapan is a key location for the integration of the two types of evidence, and, as Pollack states, it is the location about which most is known.
